
Class 1_ 

Book. 



Copyright H?._ 



COPWHGHT DEPOSIT 



I 



THE INFINITE PEESENCE 



THE INFINITE PRESENCE 



BY 



GEORGE M. GOULD, M.D. 




NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
1910 



-^5*^ 



Qj^ 



Copyright, 1910, by 
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



All Eights Reserved 



)GLA2730S3 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Infinite Presence ... 1 

II. The Biologic Basis of Ethics and 

Eeligion 39 

III. The Eole of Maternal Love in 

Organic Evolution .... 93 

IV. Immortality . . . . . . 154 

V. Back to the Old Ways ... 213 



THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

CHAPTER I 



THE INFINITE PKESENCE 1 



Kant said that two things were sublime : 
the starry heavens above, and the moral 
law within. Upon reflection, the stars sug- 
gest to "the natural man" but a crude, 
vague, and far from infinite idea of in- 
finity, and many experts have " explained" 
the moral law as a utilitarian and evolu- 
tionary product. The philosopher's rev- 
erence serves, nevertheless, to divide the 
infinities into two classes, like all other 
phenomena, those without and those with- 
in, objective and subjective, or macrocos- 
mic and microcosmic. It will be found 
that a third class must be added which 
will comprise a number that belong to 

i The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1904. 
I 



2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

neither world exclusively, but are the joint 
product of both. In a rigid Berkeleian or 
Hegelian analysis all would be subjective ; 
in a looser one all equally more or less 
composite; and especially if one accepts 
language at its par value, and common 
sense at its own rating. 

The eye of the mind that does not infer 
sees the starry firmament simply as light- 
points in a dark blue setting. Distant 
these points are indeed, but any very 
great distance is a teaching of hearsay, 
or inference, and only the astronomer, or 
one he has taught, has more than a vague 
and extremely finite conception of their 
immeasurable distance. The shepherds 
thought the guiding-star of Bethlehem 
moved and stood over the manger in 
which lay the wonderful child. They had 
no hint of the amazing distance, even of 
the nearest star, and possibly even Kant's 
thought of it was vague as compared with 
that we now hold. How many Americans 
and Europeans to-day suppose that a 
meteor is truly a "falling star"? That a 
star could not move, or point out a local- 
ity upon the earth, or the earth itself, is 



INFINITE PRESENCE 3 

not to be understood by the shepherd 
mind. If a newspaper reader has seen a 
long string of figures expressing a guess 
at the distances of stars, they of course 
express to him no idea more definite than 
if the numbers were one tenth or ten times 
as many. It becomes at once the some- 
thing non-finite, as do all such things not 
cognizable by his assumed finiteness. 
The infinite is thus to most a mere nega- 
tive, whatever its nature, an impatient 
naming of the unexplored and unnam- 
able. If one attempts to bring to the or- 
dinary mind a somewhat more adequate 
thought or picture of the infinite, trying 
to replace its negative by<a positive idea, 
he is met by a smile of incredulity or of 
shrinking wonder, confessing renuncia- 
tion and the inability to follow. Should 
one bravely persist and endeavor to show 
that the so-called "light" of the stars 
exists only, and is created, in a tiny, 
wholly dark space six inches or more be- 
hind his own eye, there is a risk of a 
not flattering answer. Add that not only 
light, but color also, sound, hardness, heat, 
cold, odors, etc., — all the "things" our 



4 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

senses tell us of, are sensations, mind cre- 
ations, unknown products of unknown 
things by unknown methods and mechan- 
isms. That would be unkind to him, and 
worse than useless. 

Our language demonstrates the purely 
negative and renouncing action of mind 
as regards infinity. We have no word for 
expressing it positively. * ' Endless, ' ' * ' im- 
measurable,' ' " infinite,' ' etc., give no de- 
sired positiveness, and even the quasi- 
affirmation in the word "eternal" means 
only that which endures for an age, the 
latter meaning originally a lifetime. The 
seeming positive notation of the word 
"omnipotence" is no less essentially nega- 
tive, because men have never thought of 
it as anything but subjective, — an attrib- 
ute of God. But God Himself, the idea 
of Him held by the careless believer, is 
only that of an unknown, unknowable, 
non-finite, into which vast unknown are 
indiscriminately flung all tormenting mys- 
teries. He thus becomes philosophically 
the reserve of inexplainables awaiting our 
leisure and ability. One by one we must 
take out and at least seek to solve our 



INFINITE PRESENCE 5 

problems. God must be made cognizable. 
We can hardly be as perfect as He, which 
is commanded, if we cannot even know 
and understand His characteristics ; surely 
not, if we do not even attempt the least 
of such knowing and understanding. 

It is not an advanced psychology that 
demonstrates the mental creation of finite 
sensations, and it is also as early shown 
that the larger makings of infinities are 
from the materials furnished by the mind 
rather than from the outside world. It is 
a truism that seeing is slowly learned, 
and that, whatever hints reflected ether- 
waves bring the eye, vision — accurate, 
useful vision — is a product of the brain 
and mind. In the same way, evidently, 
one can readily determine that the thing 
actually seen, the blue sky with its dots of 
light, beyond the reach of his flung peb- 
ble, does not even suggest infinite space 
or universe to the shepherd. Nor does the 
objective give any positive idea of any 
kind concerning the non-finite. An un- 
known something out there in some in- 
comprehensible way started some vibra- 
tions which somehow or other were trans- 



6 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

formed, and at last got to the proper 
brain cells. From numberless results of 
the kind the mind made inferences and 
reasoned of the outside sources of the 
sensations. One need not proceed to the 
Berkeleian extreme of denying all objec- 
tive reality in order to take from that out- 
side cause such vast quantities of attri- 
butes as must be done to be just to the 
spirit co-partner. Even the newest physics 
resulting from radium discoveries may, 
according to Professor Lodge, leave some 
abiding nucleus of materiality at the center 
of the many-guised, cunningly concealed, 
ionic molecule. If at last that is dissipa- 
ted into ions, empty centers of vibra- 
tional forces, the vibrations at least exist, 
and with them all that is essentially objec- 
tive. The atomic theory is by no means 
destroyed with the destruction of all 
" atoms." 

In the same way there remains at least 
the assured residue of objective infinities, 
but when the mind gets her proper share 
of its endowments, they are not so rich 
as supposed. Infinity dwells less without 
than within, and mental cooperation is 



INFINITE PRESENCE 7 

required for the creation of even the 
crudest objective infinity. Summarize all 
the racial sense-impressions, condense a 
hundred kinds to the quintessential in- 
stincts, still they would be finite in origin 
and number. The multiplication of finite- 
nesses by any fini^s number leaves the 
product still as far from infinite as the 
first unit. Were the mind a product of 
materiality and finite experiences, the 
word " infinite, " even with the negative 
connotation, would not have been formed. 
That it has positive significance is indu- 
bitable, hence the iron law of causality 
demands that it come from no finite 
source without. We do, in fact, endow 
that without with our own self-grown in- 
finities. The analyses of reality, the prog- 
ress of psychology, all show that our 
new science is largely a transplanting or 
taking back to our own minds the rich 
qualities with which we had too generously 
endowed matter. In our generosity we 
lent the old actor our own wardrobe of 
the spirit. He thereby acted the cosmic 
role assigned to him with better grace and 
seemliness, but he was in honor bound to 



8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

return the gold-embroidered cloak and 
gem-decked crown. He could not wear 
them in the street. Nor did he need them 
there, for in the highways of materiality 
is no cold or warmth, nakedness or gar- 
ment, beauty or grace. It is only person- 
ality and sensation that need, or know, or 
can own these things. When the intel- 
lectual part of personality grows beyond 
the charm of played amusements, it smiles 
in pity upon the child's need and the time 
when it found so much pleasure in imag- 
ining into the sticks and wires of its mari- 
onettes (world, space, and time) its own 
greater, more infinite, personal comedies 
and tragedies. 

And yet the wealth and power which 
materiality pays back bring their own re- 
sponsibilities. Unused gold without in- 
terest is of no more value than so much 
iron, and to yield interest or profit, work 
must be done. By no unimproved or un- 
earned endowment do we come to the grasp 
and enjoyment even of metaphysical 
things. The possibility lies in our nature, 
it is true, and in the nature of mind; but 
it does not spontaneously exercise itself. 



INFINITE PRESENCE 9 

We gain the heaven, not only of feeling and 
duty, but of intellect and imagination, by 
hardened muscles and tireless climbing. 
Metaphysical athletics is the most strenu- 
ous of all, but these scalers of the Alps of 
the Spirit have seen views unknown to 
others, and so superb, so indescribable, 
that the rare light in their eyes is almost 
the sole hint of the supernatural glory. 
The philosophies and religions, the poesies, 
literatures, and sciences, of the few climb- 
ers, are only fainter suggestions; and yet 
these have made the civilization which we 
find so miraculous. If humanity itself 
should attempt the great ascent, whence 
the stars are seen, not as discrete light- 
spots sown in the overhead blue, but as the 
beacon-fires of the soul calling Life to vic- 
tory over the world ! 

The two infinities of Kant did not chill 
or hurt him, but his fearlessness is shared 
by few. Only for a short instant, at best, 
will most persons consent to look open- 
eyed at any clear image of fate or of in- 
finity. Scarcely a friend of mine will look 
steadily at the clear midnight sky for a 
minute in silence. The freezing of the 



io THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

heart that follows, the appalling shudder 
at the dread contemplation of infinity, 
which may be called cosmic horror, is 
more than can be endured. If those stars 
are absolutely and positively infinite, then 
there is no up or down, and they knew no 
beginning, will have no ending. With any 
such staring Gorgon of fatalism the sur- 
charged attention is shaken, and the chem- 
istry of common life seizes upon the liquid 
crystals with avid hunger. 

But why may not this cosmic horror be 
turned to cosmic pleasure? It is at best 
not bravery or athletic prowess, and at 
worst it is a psychic want of equilibrium, 
a morbid metaphysics. When one has 
health, strength, and expertness to do a 
thing there is pleasure in doing it. In a 
word, the horror is from disuse of the 
innate power, and the sublimest pleasure 
may be found in excursions into the in- 
finite. For not the least of the astrono- 
mer's delights springs from the grand dis- 
tances and incommensurables with which 
he deals, the limitlessness of the pictures 
nightly spread before him. And is not the 
historian's similar pleasure in the sweep 



INFINITE PRESENCE n 

of eye from age to age and from nation to 
nation, correlating to unity millions of in- 
dividualities and events hidden from those 
who dwell in valleys and in singlenesses? 
In his analyses and syntheses the philoso- 
pher learns of another kind of grave 
charm, whereby the apparent disorder and 
fortuity of the world are systematized and 
coordinated into order and unity by some 
fair and far harmonizing principle. Such, 
in truth, are athletes ; but their endowment 
and ability differ in no way from that of 
the shepherd following his star. 

However modern and civilized the shep- 
herd may be, should one rally him to an 
attack upon the infinite (God's infinities 
having been first set aside), he would 
answer that there are at best but two in- 
finities: space and time. And he would 
see but one childish method — the stretch- 
ing of the imagination. With perfect 
plausibility may not one contend that there 
are as many ways of "feeling after God," 
as many routes of excursion into infinity, 
as there are personalities? Every one 
differs from all others, even from his 
brother, in some quality, aptitude, or 



12 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

ability. The poorest soul has at least one 
window opening upon the beyond-the-lim- 
ited. Most are richer in windows than 
they know. And richer in roads, too, for 
these lead out and subdivide, the last being 
but well-blazed trails, perhaps, — and fol- 
low them at your peril and pleasure! — 
conducting to great outlooking peaks. 
The window-gazers, — well, they can at 
least see their fellows yonder on the sum- 
mit. But the infinite is not to be observed 
alone; it is not only observation, it is ac- 
tion as well. 

Even the infinite of space may be sought 
by different routes and methods. Many 
are common, — by images of trains of cars 
en route for the moon, the sun, or the 
nearest star; by written figures giving 
the lowest comprehensible unit and its 
cumulated multiplications to a tottering 
incomprehensibility ; by light-years ; x by 
thought-spannings of standards derived 
from time-exposures of plates in photo- 
graphing nebulas; by spectrum analyses 
of stars approaching or receding. Are 

i The distance traveled by light in one year, at the 
rate of 186,500 miles per second. 



INFINITE PRESENCE 13 

such helps not often great hindrances? 
More resolute imaginations find them so. 
One may readapt an old likeness, devised 
before spectrum analysis (and curiously 
fore-feeling it) , and imagine an eye poised 
upon a beam of light shot into infinite 
space from the satellite of a planet of 
some sun of a great solar system. If the 
eye travels slower than the rays that left 
after it, the unrolling process seems has- 
tened beyond the actual; if it travels at 
the same rate of speed as all the other 
rays, then the moon and the system are 
seen as if stationary; but if it travels 
faster than the light that left before it, 
then there is to it an inversion of the proc- 
ess, and the satellite will be seen to draw 
back into its planet, this return to its sun, 
and finally the sun fade to the primitive 
invisible nebula. 

By such fancies the mind may conquer 
its own weakness; but it must not be for- 
gotten that materiality not only does not 
suggest, but that it even disallows them. 
Better methods are without images, by 
sheer intellectual muscle, generally with 
helpful suggestion of materiality, but not 



i 4 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

by mirroring alone, and always with vital- 
izing feeling. One arrives sometimes by 
means of straight contemplation from 
mountain-tops, or even by gazing, by day 
v and upon one's back, at the cloud-flecked 
and apertured zenith. At night a help is 
got by piercing beyond the easily visible 
stars to fainter and for long invisible 
deeper-lying ones, — and then the stretch 
of endless blue depths still below; the 
dizzying sight through a telescope of the 
jagged crater-tops of the moon jutting 
against the cold deep. Many such experi- 
ences widen and vivify thought, and leave 
enduring memories, psychic recuperating 
stations against more resolute mounting. 
It should not be forgotten that if there is 
a really and positively infinite number of 
stars, then at every conceivable point of 
the firmament there is located a star. 
Hence, if light were stronger or eyes more 
sensitive, there would be no discrete light- 
spots and star-points, but only a sheen of 
slightly variant intensity everywhere. A 
qualification of this image is required by 
the fact that about all stars are, prob- 
ably, circling black planetary bodies, 



INFINITE PRESENCE 15 

which, rhythmically intercepting and re- 
vealing the starlight, would cause the 
diffused glitter or sheen of the sky to 
quiver with an intense stippling. 

Finally, to grasp within the mental hold- 
ing an adequate idea of the infinity of the 
spatial universe, recourse must be had 
to the scientifically educated imagination. 
Stretch the images and plays of fancy as 
one will, multiply conceivable s with all 
the expertness of the best metaphysical 
prestidigitator, and yet if a limit is as- 
signed beyond which stars and matter do 
not extend, then one inevitable consequence 
results; if finite, it must somewhere have 
a center of attraction. To that center, in 
an infinite time past, must have drawn the 
entire matter of the universe into one huge 
central sun. If planetization must follow, 
then the central sun must still be large 
enough to dominate all satellites as revolv- 
ing servants. There is not only no proof, 
there is perfect disproof that such a cen- 
tral body exists, and that there is any such 
revolutionary order of the visible stars. 
Hence the matter and the suns of the uni- 
verse extend, positively and limitlessly, 



16 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

and eternally endure. Touch the logic 
with emotion, and one has realized the in- 
finite of space. 

There is a comforting corollary to this, 
one that reestablishes the stability that 
seemed to be slipping, and which tended 
to arouse the old cosmic horror. Our own 
solar-system home cannot swing beyond 
certain gravitational limits — cannot be 
"lost" — because it is held within infallible 
topographic bounds by the pull of the in- 
finity of matter upon every side. The 
nearer it approaches any perihelion, the 
more the opposed infinite calls its return. 

One may play with the thought (rather, 
the words) of infinite vacuity or emptiness, 
pure space ; but the imagination balks ; and 
the inevitable extension of the ether into 
all unoccupied space renders the thought 
resultless and useless. Moreover, the idea 
of motion or velocity of a discrete point 
or world in otherwise unoccupied and lim- 
itless space is impossible and self-contra- 
dictory. There can be no up or down or 
direction of such a body. Even in a sun- 
filled infinity there is no direction in any 
final sense. Lastly, that final and all-dom- 



INFINITE PRESENCE 17 

inating fatalism of the objective world, 
gravitation, precludes any limit to that 
world. 

The mystery and the infinity of matter 
seem now fast disappearing into ideas of 
force. But one may rest secure that all 
the essentials of an objective world will 
remain. There is to be no utter deliques- 
cence of externals into subjectivities. 
Neither physics nor metaphysics can kill 
the other in the duel of eternity. Periodic 
vibrations and rhythms become no less 
objective or real by the death of all the 
atoms, and the essential of materiality re- 
mains, possibly even more stable and un- 
changeable, with these clotted swirls of 
ions and ethers, than with the crude lumps 
called atoms. 

And, with all material resolutions and 
Protean disguises, there remains gravita- 
tion, that most unexceptional, inexplicable, 
and primal of all the fatalisms of the ma- 
terial universe. Only spirit is freed from 
its dominance, and even that only when it 
is freed from its bound body. In the 
alembic of thought the old idea of the ma- 
terial of the universe may, and probably 



18 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

will, disappear; but only to rise again as 
motion, which will endure as essentially 
objective. There is an ill-defined border- 
line between spirit and body somewhere 
along the track marked " sensation,' ' in 
which motion seems both subjective and 
objective ; but when one actually gets well 
across it, supposed mentality on the one 
side is clearly only motility, and on the 
other it is as surely only immotile mind. 
On the outside, as we look at it, the entire 
product passing as the old conception of 
"matter" is perfectly represented by the 
word ' ' gravitation. ' ' Hence, transfixed 
by our thought, it becomes the consummate 
and convincing exhibit of omnipotence, or 
the infinite of power. How absolutely it 
fuses the mysteries and controls the facts 
of matter is seen in any attempt to think 
ungravitation. The result would be the 
homogeneity and motionlessness of the uni- 
verse reduced to uniform nebulosity. One 
atom could not vary in distance or size 
from any other, and none could be in mo- 
tion. Thus, gravitation is the sole source 
of quality and motion. Antigravitation, 
the unlimited sway of centrifugalism, 



INFINITE PRESENCE 19 

would be followed by a more striking ex- 
tension of the component matter of the uni- 
verse into infinite space, and this would 
be simply an eternal thinning process, 
wherein the increasing nebularization 
would never quite become an impossible 
nothing. On its positive side gravitation 
thus becomes the best and most easily 
grasped demonstration of the infinite of 
power. And as no human intelligence has 
scarcely caught sight of even a hint of an 
explanation of this strange force, it stands 
before us as truly supernatural, and all the 
more amazing to the trained mind, because 
unlike most thought of the supernatural, 
it is uniform and exceptionless. No atom 
ever escaped its control. It was the first 
born of all fates and fatalisms. The con- 
dition of true philosophy and mental power 
is to realize and explain that which is the 
most common. The poor mind concerns 
itself least with that to which it is most 
habited. To the other the oldest and most 
invariable stimulates the most curious in- 
quiry. If gravitation is ever explained, 
the oldest source of awe and the greatest 
sense of mystery will pass out of human 



20 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

life, and both peasant and philosopher will 
have lost the splendid example of sublime 
and omnipotent power. The charm of its 
mystery will, at least, have been lost, and 
the god of matter, gorgon to the at first 
startled observer, restful to the resolved 
mind, will have been dethroned by a math- 
ematical and mechanical formula. Other 
methods, of course, remain of reaching to- 
ward the conception of omnipotence, but 
none is comparable to this. Herbert 
Spencer has given us the look of it in his 
First Principles, when he sketches the con- 
gelation of the solar system out of the 
supposed primal nebula. In measureless 
years he says the icicles are revaporized, 
and thus the cold eternal heart of fate pro- 
ceeds in rhythmic systole and diastole, each 
beat a universe repeated every billion 
years. One may forget that this is a corol- 
lary, a method of action, of the wonder of 
gravitation. 

The infinity of time is sooner dispensed 
with or mastered, because time is merely 
the measure of vibrational motion. One 
thus comes near reducing it to an attribute 
of mind, a registering of revolutions, a 



INFINITE PRESENCE 29 

method of mnemonics. Quicker or slower 
become very relative gaugings, and to the 
eye on the ray of light, meaningless and 
self-contradictory. In a static, motionless, 
or non-revolving universe, there could be 
no time, and plainly none in vacuous space. 
It therefore becomes the name for period- 
icity of motion, begot of physical recur- 
rence and of mentality, non-existent 
without both parents. How necessary is 
the subjective parent is illustrated by the 
De Quincey opium dream. If the dream 
would always result from the hashish as 
it did in that instance, if the test were not 
dangerous, if it were not morbid, and if 
the tester were surely strong enough, a 
single daring trial would be educative. 
But pathologists and experimenters do not 
advise it, and it is unnecessary because the 
results are to be secured by normal meth- 
ods and are more satisfying. The normal 
dream of sleep furnishes an abundance of 
data, too frequently undervalued, as we 
know. Freed from the bindings of the> 
body, the dream-personality plays reck- 
lessly with the stupidities of the waking 
sense of space and time. Our daytime 



22 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

efforts to condense or stretch time out can 
never equal that dainty ease. We live so 
fast or so slow then, we focus long stretches 
to an instant, or find the dragging moment 
never passes, or the trivial deed is never 
done. We stride from mountain-top to 
mountain-top with miraculous ease and 
fearlessness, slide down clouds or along 
the edges of the world with such fine un- 
consciousness of impossibilities ! The sub- 
jectivity of time is illustrated, too, by sleep 
itself, especially if dreamless. Where has 
time been since, eight hours ago, we 
stopped thinking ? The sleep of anesthesia 
is no more, nor less, striking. There 
are also pathologic and traumatic lapses 
of time in which, with the loss of mem- 
ory, there is also a loss of personality, the 
finding of another self, entirely alien, with 
as sudden a resumption of the old self 
after weeks or months. Under such cir- 
cumstances the puzzle becomes, not what 
is time, and where, but what is the ego 
itself? Indeed, how large a portion of 
what we call individuality, in a last analy- 
sis, disappears in the mystery of memory? 
In our best and most revelatory experi- 



INFINITE PRESENCE 23 

ences with the infinite, there is a subtile 
fusion of objective and subjective, each 
illuminating the other, and each crying 
"Brother!" The influence of rare com- 
binations of mental sensitiveness and rarer 
circumstances with almost unique compos- 
ites of fact, may, once or twice in life, 
bring an experience of incomparable stim- 
ulation and rebirth. Such moments come 
at some time to most of us. Once in our 
life a sunset may occur, a perfect silence, 
a sickness or a flower, a vision from a 
still mountain-top, a billow-breaking rock 
and a far, fine, sunshot horizon line, a 
divine music-moment, a terrible line of 
poetry, a bird singing in storm and shine, 
some tale of heroism with its swift reflex 
on our own failure or success, — how many 
are the incidents that reveal the world — 
and ourselves — to ourselves. Many infin- 
ities may thus meet and blossom in the 
soul to a marvelous flower. Here is one: 
a becalmed boat, silent, upon a silent and 
unrippled sea; a soft veil of enwrapping 
fog blotting out all things of sky, ocean, or 
horizon. By some lightening of the fog, 
suddenly there gleamed out of the east the 



24 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

full moon, a huge globe of silver glory. 
With a glance to the other side there was 
seen the setting sun glaring through the 
mist with crimson intensity. How infin- 
itesimal the bit of human life poised in 
nothingness between those two awful Eyes 
of Eternity! 

Moreover, not only infinitely small, but 
infinitely large and extended ! As the ma- 
terial universe is limitless so must Life 
extend beyond finiteness. We know that 
all stars and planets have essentially the 
same constitution and nature as our own 
solar system; sometime during evolution, 
therefore, one or more planets in each sys- 
tem will become the home of Life. If but 
one in a million, Life which is intelligence 
or spirit, is still absolutely limitless. 

The best and richest of our infinities 
are of the spirit's own creating. One said 
of a certain rhapsodist that his gravitation 
was upward. The unstruggling ease of the 
bird's flight seems natural to us, but in 
truth our thought is not subject to gravi- 
tation ; it goes up or down with equal will- 
ingness. There is even no direction in its 
spaceless universe. Kant felt the moral 



INFINITE PRESENCE 25 

law within as sublime, as convincing a 
demonstration as the starry firmament. 
Matter, space, time, and power, these words 
express the whole of externality. The 
rest is spirit-land. And how rich it is, how 
much richer than that poor out-thereness ! 
If the real and greater infinite is self, why 
not navigate that universe? We may do 
so as successfully, more so, one would sur- 
mise, than by any lift or push or reflex of 
materiality, any thrust through space or 
time. How few have thought of discover- 
ing themselves! It seems a strange per- 
version that moved humanity to set out 
upon its world voyage of discovery. The 
journey of knowledge began in quest of the 
farthest and least useful wealth of good. 
Leaving the home Lares and Penates the 
voyager sailed to discover stars ; the world 
of astronomy and geography he would first 
know. When he found his own earth, its 
nature, geology, next moved his curiosity; 
then its animals. Finally, coming ever 
nearer, he discovered his own body, and 
busied himself for long with its least im- 
portant bones and muscles. At last he saw 
the mirrored picture of his own face, and 



26 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

that of his brother. The acquaintance 
should ripen into amity, for all his knowl- 
edges and acquirements are epitomized and 
reclassified, revivified in the ego, to study 
which he now returns to the home. The 
household gods are found in a sad state 
of neglect, and in their place is the new 
altar of Science, with the motto, Spiritus 
mortuus est. The Father, he finds, has also 
died. In his voyaging he had heard that 
spirit does not die. The priest at the altar 
of Science assures him that all force may 
be transmuted, but not extinguished. Is 
not mind, then, also a force f Is it not as 
indubitable that the "mental" of humanity 
is being increasingly worked into the very 
warp and woof of the material world ? Ah, 
but the weaver, man, at "the roaring loom 
of time ? ' ' His spirit cannot be localizable, 
as his body was, and the old cosmic horror 
of infinity breaks or threatens once more. 
The tragedy of broken faith recurs forever 
new, until one learns that spirit is not here 
nor there, and is as real, though not bound 
by the realities of space, time, matter, or 
gravitation. All previous studies of the 
out-there were preliminary and prepara- 



INFINITE PRESENCE 27 

tory muscular play before the trust of the 
spirit wings in an air finer than the lumi- 
nif erous ether. 

How is it with the others, his brother 
voyagers? The majority have remained 
"common sailors/ ' the tools of a superior 
directive will. They have felt no need, 
nor essayed any power, of knowing the in- 
finite. In their natural bodies (these sad 
feeders and workers, not for themselves, 
but for others) psychism may sometimes 
nest. Promises and possibilities may from 
the first be suggested, the beginnings of 
the tool-making faculty of true mentality; 
but they are themselves the pathetic tools 
of the struggle for existence, the methods 
of making secure the incarnation process. 
Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do 
and die. The second great class take their 
infinities on faith, trusting to the reports of 
others as to the existence of such things — ■ 
the routine accepters of unstudied creeds. 
Allied to these are those who follow little 
less blindly the school of prepared philo- 
sophic or historical thought into which 
their minds drop with the least friction and 
hurt. 



28 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

But the number of the returning Cap- 
tains of Thought, of the original discov- 
erers of the infinite, constantly increases, 
and they come to greet and to know one 
another, from afar in either space or time. 

For they are themselves normally space- 
less and timeless, and hence true citizens 
of a genuine Fourth Dimension. And they 
are one, a united people. Each, by predi- 
lection, may have, indeed must have, a 
special method of realizing the infinite, but 
all have the same ultimate ideal. They are 
students, lovers, brothers of the Infinite 
Presence. The universality of matter, the 
infinity of filled space, the rhythms of time 
and motion, the omnipotence of gravitation, 
all have prepared the student to see, to feel, 
and to know the Infinite Presence. 

The definings of the name "God," even 
by the most intelligent of its users, and 
even by a sect, or by one person, make it 
impossible to use the word longer so that 
it shall have any definite significance. 
Close analysis of a single attribute soon 
lands us in contradictions, if not absurd- 
ities. Mankind has so persistently accus- 
tomed itself to make God the indiscriminate 



INFINITE PRESENCE 29 

holder of its indiscriminations that the 
term has become a mere receptacle for hu- 
manity's unsolved problems, a sort of 
universal question-box of antitheses and 
puzzles. Instead of adding to the conglom- 
erate, it is our duty to withdraw the slips 
and answer the questions, if possible. 
There is no valid reason against, and every 
reason in favor of, the scientific study of 
God, a rational theology. If there is any- 
thing corresponding in the least to the 
reality designated by the name, let us learn 
carefully and accurately what it is. Even 
the self-supposed atheists and materialists 
are, to a degree, theists and believers in 
spirit. It is incumbent on them to deter- 
mine how far they must go and how little 
they can believe. The jumble of incon- 
sistencies and of moral and intellectual 
cowardices that the weak have made of God 
by no means excuses or warrants wholesale 
denial and impatient cynicism. When the 
tragi-comedian Heine would relieve his 
own suffering by a sad laugh at the world, 
he said, "Oh, He'll forgive me, it's His 
business." The amazing extent to which 
sin has dictated the conception of God is a 



3 o THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

terrible revelation of how little men have 
lived up to their light. " Jesus died and 
paid it all, all the debt I owe," — whole 
theologies of such horrors do not lessen 
the truth that vicarious atonements are 
the commonest tragedies of our every-day 
life. "God is Love," "He is Goodness 
itself," sings the devout believer, and he 
believes as fervently, or did once, in the 
hell pictured by Adam de Eos and Dante. 
St. Francis, Calvin, the burners of the 
Albigenses, all used the same word for 
their divinity. "He is Beauty" to the 
artist; "but, first, Truth," cautions the 
scientist; and to the poet, the union of 
Truth, Goodness, Love, and Beauty. It 
grows plain that the old way made of Him 
the impossible alembic of all contradic- 
tions, a sorry makeshift of dialectic 
difficulty and ethical failure. The funda- 
mental error of all the definers was that 
of making Him responsible for the inor- 
ganic universe, or cause of the material 
world. Ultimate origins, they did not see, 
are insoluble and inexplainable, and no 
help was to be got in our intellectual trials 
or practical woes by the absurd supposi- 



INFINITE PRESENCE 31 

tion of an uncaused omnipotent person as 
the cause of the physical universe. There 
is no proof or suggestion of proof that the 
inorganic universe came into being by any 
such help. With the modern study of life, 
however, came the recognition that, so far 
as its incarnations are concerned, it is a 
creation. We see its miracles, its millions 
of organisms created by means of effort, 
purpose, and ingenuity, every day; we see 
a common endeavor and approximated 
ideal in and behind all of them ; a guiding 
purpose is evident, converging through all 
biologic history to a plain and clear, and 
not very "far off," "divine event." In a 
word, there is manifest in all living things 
the Infinite Presence. We endow it with 
no other infinity but this of presence, for 
to the derived user of the word "I," it 
must be forever present. In every other 
derived ego, it is as manifest, whether 
flower, tree, animal, bird, or man. All are 
plainly of supernatural origin, physical 
forces their utilized tools. No purely 
physical thing has an ego. It is utterly 
undesigned and purposeless. To this a 
consistent and earnest science is driven, 



32 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

or softly comes, by the inevitability which 
Lord Kelvin, in his way, has recently ad- 
mitted. How much or how little of the 
attributes formerly crowded upon "God" 
may be possessed by our "Biologos," none 
may say. None may with impunity trans- 
fer the old to him, or bring new. He is 
not to be unloaded upon. The old god is 
dead with the accumulated sorrows of the 
ages. The new one is not the resolver of 
our mysteries and forgiver of our sins. 
His own world difficulties are enough, and 
he demands of each of us to aid, not op- 
pose Him. 

And quietly grows the perception that, 
when as person and spirit we do thus feel 
and know it, we recognize it as like our- 
selves, as one with us, as the Father of us, 
we the Sons. He has no eyes and yet is 
looking at us, no ears and yet He hears 
us, no face and yet His smile greets us. 
He is not here nor there, and yet both here 
and there; not then nor now, but both, 
and continuously — this Divinity of Biol- 
ogy, Father of Life. 

It remains for the modern cultivated 
mind and sensitive heart to fuse into liv- 



INFINITE PRESENCE 33 

ing personality the antitheses of religion 
and science, esthetics and morality. As 
the outcome of ages of specialized effort, 
such a synthesis is at last possible. The 
intellectual mirroring or coordinating 
faculty, viewed in the most superb of its 
philosophies or sciences or material civ- 
ilizations, viewed in all of them combined, 
is, of course, but a part, a small part, of 
the living and feeling personality; it is 
but a part of life's being and work here. 
Eeligion also caught one of the most vital 
and primal of the truths of existence, the 
Fatherhood of life, and the childhood of 
the living; but it ignored the beautiful 
too much, the ethical — the objectively eth- 
ical — far more, and the intellectual was 
to it almost the same as the devilish. But 
few artists have ever learned that beauty 
is only the smile and the benediction of 
gladness over the true and the good, the 
loved and loving real, and can in no way 
precede or ignore the three fore-running 
gods of life, religion, reality, and morality. 
Neither dare ethics do the same as to its 
own three elder brothers. But nothing 
now hinders the modern child of the ages 



34 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

from having the clear scientific grasp of 
the world of a Kelvin, and at the same time 
being as religions and as ethical as St. 
Thomas, as beauty-loving as Ruskin. For 
the Infinite Presence is instantly recog- 
nized as being the living synthesis of all 
these characteristics of which we as partial 
incarnations present only facets. Eeli- 
gion is but the yearning toward Him, and 
actualizing Him in our own life, history 
the record of the progress we and the bio- 
logic process are making in this ideal- 
realism. Civilization is the tool He places 
in our hands for use toward that end, 
morality the method of using the tool, 
beauty and happiness the proofs that it 
has been used wisely and unselfishly. We 
now know that materialistic science is not 
scientific, that exclusive morality is im- 
moral, immoral esthetics not beautiful; 
and that a zealot's religion is most irreli- 
gious. Let us have done with partialism ! 
And how different the infinity of the 
Presence from the inorganic infinities! 
Purpose, intelligence, ideal, beauty, — 
these were the lendings of man to nature, 
so far as the lifeless infinities were con- 



INFINITE PRESENCE 35 

cerned; but every cell, organ, organism, 
history, — the whole biologic process, — 
is instinct with them. There is every- 
where increasing success dominating al- 
ways-present and partial failure, person- 
ality without individuality, an eternally 
new phasing of the Infinite Presence. 
Because it is a genuine incarnation, his 
indivisible life deputed in each cell and 
in each mind, with its allotted duty and 
work. But the reins are held in one hand. 
We are free only as deputies, not abso- 
lutely, and never without the daily ac- 
counting, the night's necessary repairing 
of sleep. 

All history is revealed as experiment- 
ings and exercises in methods of gaining 
the consciousness of and unity with this 
single presence. Eeligions and religion 
first made the ideal clear, determined upon 
its actualization, and, despite a thousand 
failures, have always held the I-and-my- 
Father-are-one steadily before reluctantly 
obedient humanity. Each in his way, but 
none doubting, the religious leaders, the 
saints and the martyrs, heathen and Chris- 
tian, forefelt, foreknew the unity that 



36 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

would come even when their own errors 
should have helped to bring it. They may 
have cursed the science necessary to bring 
it about, and their curse helped the bring- 
ing. Materialism and science may have 
denied the religious brother, but each 
was necessary to the other. Speculative 
philosophy and dialectic were but a train- 
ing of expertness. The systems fail, but 
systematization succeeds in their failures. 
The art that should unite truth and beauty 
may have been untrue and unbeautiful, but 
it kept the vision, cheered the worker, and 
died for the new art coming or to come. 
The best and most serviceable tool of the 
Infinite Presence is civilization, and of its 
uses we are as yet only dreaming the most 
childish dreams. 

For the one characterizing and domi- 
nant fact of the biologic process is the 
steady and measurable increase of its 
control of physical and chemical force. 
With every new and successful organism, 
— amoeba, grass-blade, animal, man, — 
there is, by so much, a detachment of 
power from the inorganic, and an added 
gain of energy at the disposal of design 



INFINITE PRESENCE 37 

and purpose. The clear pointing is to a 
vitalization of matter, at least a vital con- 
trol of it and of its forces, a spiritualiza- 
tion of tlie mechanical. The inorganic, the 
infinities of space, time, matter, and force, 
in and of themselves are inconsequent, 
meaningless, have utterly no raison d'etre. 
In the hands of spirit they may be of ser- 
vice, and their existence justified. The 
God of biology, the Infinite Presence, is 
patiently, increasingly, gaining such con- 
trol by means of civilization. 

"The moral law within" merits the 
grandeur of its office as seen by Kant, in 
that it is simply and solely the command 
of the Infinite Presence that we, His sons, 
must become His heirs, helpers, and co- 
partners. That of old is the significance 
of all ethics; and of all religion, which is 
but duty vivified, obligation motived by 
love and graced by beauty. Morality is 
our obedience to the call; happiness, of 
the world or of any one of us, the proof 
that we have obeyed, the benediction of 
His "Well done!" 

The commingling of transcendent ingenu- 
ity with mistakes, of plain comedy, and 



38 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

plainer tragedy, in the incarnation process, 
has its theoretical and its practical lessons. 
The Infinite Presence is made more famil- 
iar and lovable by them, despite the athe- 
ist's scorn. They give proof of the spon- 
taneous and indestructible primitive belief 
that, though omnipresent, He is not en- 
tirely omniscient, and far indeed from om- 
nipotent. They convince us that He is 
both Father and Elder Brother (surely 
He is, although of whence and how we have 
no thought), who wrests from Fate a new 
world of design and freedom, and to whom 
the ancient fatalisms are yielding prog- 
ressive obedience. The unsuccesses in the 
copartnership are those who theoretically 
or practically deny the kinship, seeking 
selfish instead of corporate advantage. 
They are the sinners, the disobedients by 
choice. Then there are the failures, his 
mistakes or ours, the defective classes, the 
parasites, the pessimists, the suicides, — 
the egotists of all sorts and kinds. Are 
there too few obedients left? Ours the 
fault, at least in part, and certainly ours 
the misfortune. To us most clear of all 
comes His call to help ! 



CHAPTER n 

THE BIOLOGIC BASIS OF ETHICS AND 
RELIGION 1 

I was recently taking a walk along one 
of our principal streets in Philadelphia, 
puzzled as to what I might say to a com- 
pany of good people whom I had been 
asked to meet. At one of the crossings 
there seemed to be a far greater number 
of persons gathered about the four corners 
than usual. Upon the first corner I found 
a man with a gaudily-painted star-figure, 
mounted upon an easel; by whirling the 
star and noting where the chosen ray 
should stop, personal destiny, or fortune, 
was foretold — all for five cents. This de- 
vice was called "The Science of Solar 
Biology. " Crossing the street, my atten- 
tion was attracted by a man haranguing 
a dozen loafers from an old express- 

i An address to the Men's Club of the Lenox Avenue 
Unitarian Church, New York City, November 9, 1898. 

39 



40 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

wagon. It was a street-corner orator 
electioneering for the boss who had di- 
rectly or indirectly hired him. In three 
minutes the man uttered the word destiny, 
a dozen or more times, picturing the glo- 
rious future of our country if we should 
only absorb a sufficiently large number of 
conquered islands and peoples, and, in do- 
ing so, forget the evils of corrupt bossism 
and local government. On another corner 
a Salvation-Army squad was gathered, 
and the speaker was imploring and warn- 
ing — again as to destiny. Upon the last 
corner was a gathering of monists, so sat- 
isfied with "identity in diversity' ' and 
"diversity in identity' ' that they cared 
nothing for solar biology, Matt Quay's 
success, or Salvation itself. Surely the 
fates had conspired to give me a subject! 
Predestination could not have commanded 
more clearly. The destiny of the individ- 
ual in this world, that of the' Nation, that 
of humanity after death, and practical 
agnosticism — I could not complain that 
the subject was not comprehensive and 
grand enough! It was another case of 
"de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis." 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 41 

Could I do any better with it than the 
" solar biologist/' the election orator, the 
Salvation-Army lassie, or the beer-drink- 
er? Nature, as I had seen, has kindly 
endowed most of us with an ineradicable 
belief in our own ability to solve the pro- 
foundest and most unanswerable prob- 
lems; should I not be more modest than 
the destiny-solvers of the curbstone? But 
it was useless to fight genuine destiny. I 
tried to get your chairman to let me talk 
to you about trees, of which I know some- 
thing, but he demanded biology, of which 
I know too little. My egotism conquered, 
and as every mind, high or low, erudite 
or boorish, must somehow or other make 
for itself, choose, modify, accept (even in 
rejecting), and finally conquer some kind 
of a philosophy of existence, — wholly dif- 
ferent let it be also noted, from that of 
every other mind — it comes to this that 
we need not fear to tell another of our per- 
sonal philosophies, because we are each 
pretty certain that the result of the think- 
ing of that other is quite as distressing 
a product as our own. 
And this philosophic pessimism appears 



42 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

to me quite justifiable when we weigh the 
vast majority of ethical and philosophic 
♦ systems of the past. Certainty, agree- 
ment, science, cannot be predicated of them. 
Is it far from the truth to say that the 
search for certainty by means of specula- 
tive philosophy, theology, and ethics, has 
in the past ended in absolute contradiction 
and nihilism ? Every i i Professor ' ' has his 
system, but no two professors are in agree- 
ment, even the most general or distant. 
"When doctors disagree who shall decide? 
Surely we children in philosophy are justi- 
fied in doubting of both result and method 
when we behold the utter want of agree- 
ment of our teachers and elders. The 
child at the street-corner is dazed by the 
demands of the solar biologist, the polit- 
ical and the religious exhorters, and the 
monistic loafers. 

And what is the cause of the chaotic dis- 
agreement? Why have systematic ethics 
and philosophy ended in fog and vacuity? 
The splendid thinking of the philosophers 
of erudition and the stupid thinking of the 
philosophers of the street-corners have 
both resulted in utter confusion and 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 43 

subjectivism; and I believe, for precisely 
the same reason. Hegel is quite as guilty 
as the Salvation Army drummer ; each has 
clutched out of the air a lot of premises 
or prejudices, it matters not which, spun 
together a lot of syllogisms and conclu- 
sions — logically or not, matters not — re- 
gardless, utterly oblivious, of the facts. 
Each alike has been busied and delighted 
with the whirr of the word-mechanism, in- 
different and scornful of the truth that 
words and the ideas behind them must be 
simply pointers to and indicators of facts. 
The fundamental sin of both has been de- 
duction. The stupendous tragedy and 
resultlessness of the world's systematic 
thinking and unsystematic ethics should 
make us forevermore abjure the method. 
The agreement of two minds as to one 
crude objective fact will result in more 
truth and progress than all the deduction 
and subjectivism from Plato to Neo-He- 
gelianism. Scornful of the scorn of ideal- 
ists and word- jugglers, let us henceforth 
set ourselves to observe facts and draw 
rigid inferences from them. Berkeley is 
dead, and buried ; Darwin is dead, and liv- 



44 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

ing. Though half of Darwin's conclusions 
be ultimately proved erroneous, Darwin's 
method will finally lead us to truth. De- 
duction leads to vacuity and pessimism; 
induction, at least to optimistic hope. No 
longer must the carnivorous tiger of pre- 
formed theory be permitted to pounce upon 
the guileless facts. He must be slain with 
that modern weapon of precision, induc- 
tion. 

When we set ourselves to observe facts 
and draw inferences from them, we soon 
find that all objects cluster in two great 
categories: All things are either living 
or non-living; that is, the term life is 
definitely ascribable to, or deniable of, 
every fact in the universe ; the qualities of 
living things clearly differentiate them 
from all other things. When you hear 
some long-eared materialist talk about 
"The life of a crystal," or the life of the 
earth, or of the sun, you know at once 
he is a psychic plebeian, no more to be 
taken seriously than the "solar biologist." 
Every living thing shows assimilation, self- 
motility, and sensitiveness. Anything not 
exhibiting these qualities is not living. 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 45 

Moreover, the condition of all thought- 
transfer is agreement as to the meaning 
of words ; to talk about the life of non-liv- 
ing things is philologic nonsense. When 
one hears an agnostic or an atheist con- 
tending that he is religious, or a material- 
ist chattering about the universe being 
11 alive," one almost wishes to shut them in 
a deaf and dumb asylum, or to secure com- 
mitment there for oneself. 

My friend demurs at my dualism, but if 
he stands honestly on induction there is 
not a scintilla of scientific justification of 
monism. Spontaneous generation is dis- 
proved nonsense. No observation has ever 
been made of matter creating life, or of life 
becoming or causing matter. What has 
never been observed or known to have 
taken place — well, let us not be too cynical, 
but let us not waste more than a second 
of precious time, or more than a single 
spasm of our levator anguli oris muscle 
in a derisive smile of pity concerning it 
or its poor eulogizers. When the medieval 
scholastic could find nothing else to do, 
he devoted his mind to the solution of the 
awful problem, "How many thousand an- 



46 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

gels can dance upon the point of a fine 
needle at the same instant of time." He 
was the prototype of the modern monist. 
"When you inquire what monism is, you find 
that it is a wishy-washy obfuscation as to 
the distinction and definition of words; a 
namby-pamby desire to spread an obscur- 
antist curtain of unity and identity over 
things that a clear eye sees are noniden ti- 
llable, and that no eye, normal or blen- 
norrhagic, has ever seen fuse into unity. 

There are several arguments for monism 
which seem quite strong to some, but 
which seem very weak to me : — 

1. The law of casuality, it is said, de- 
mands a primal unity as the basis of all 
reality. To this there are two perfect an- 
swers. If "God" made both life and mat- 
ter, who made God? If the law of mind 
is valid and forces the question as to some 
things, it forces it as to all things. It is 
mental trickery to stop at one point and 
say that casuality ends just there. The 
law of casuality is not thus satisfied. The 
second answer is also as convincing: We 
find in our minds the demand for an ulti- 
mate cause, and we cannot escape its strin- 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 47 

gency. But this is solely the product of 
the inherited results of our personal bio- 
logic experience, an experience which ob- 
servation proves to be that of one planet's 
life, and of one set of conditions of life. 
It is easy to see that there may be cate- 
gories of existence in which the law of 
casuality would ultimately have no neces- 
sary application or stringency. Do not let 
us take our individual or racial or cosmic 
experience as the absolute test of all ob- 
jective validity. There is certainly no 
a priori necessity for doing it. 

2. A more practical reason for monism 
is the feeling of many that we must be 
loyal to God ; i. e., he is so near omnip- 
otence and omniscience that he must be 
really all-causative, absolutely all-power- 
ful, and entirely all-knowing. But a least 
instant's observation shows that every one 
of his organisms from birth to death is 
struggling with difficulties and imperfec- 
tions. A little observation would also 
show that God makes mistakes, and very 
often too ; all teratology is one small proof 
of this. Then it is indeed consummately 
poor praise of God to credit him with some 



4 8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

of the evils and vilenesses of the world. 
There is no escape from the dilemma that 
either he does not wish or that he cannot 
do some things differently. If he does not 
wish to do some things he is certainly not 
good, if he cannot do them he is surely 
not omnipotent. In either case he is not 
the God of the old-fashioned idea. 

3. Then there is the flatterer, and it is 
a sad fact that much theology is the prod- 
uct of a rather cheap sort of selfish flattery 
of God. It is safer to credit God with 
all powers ; it is also easier. A man once 
told me confidentially and as if he didn't 
wish to let God overhear him, that the 
Bible and the creeds were perhaps not true, 
but it would be safer not to act on that sup- 
position, as, after all, they might be true. 
It is a bit of ancient wisdom that to flatter 
tyrants is the shrewder way of getting on 
with them, — and the old divinities were 
most of them tyrants. 

4. There is also the positive shirker of 
sin, the professional scapegoater. The 
old theologies are full of this philosophy, 
the doctrine of the vicarious atonement 
being a scarlet example. The popular 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 49 

hymnology of evangelicism reeks with 
slimy morbidity. " Jesus died and paid it 
all, all the debt I owe," and " There is a 
fountain filled with blood, drawn from Im- 
manuePs veins; vile sinners plunged be- 
neath that flood lose all their guilty 
stains ;" were bellowed into my childish 
ears by fat hypocrisy and lean frenzy. 1 

5. There remains the monism of pseudo- 
scientific materialism, one of the many dis- , 
gusting products of prejudice and psycho- 
logic cunning, not infrequent among a class 
of folk who conceal their asses-ears of 
atheism and materialism beneath the lion's 
skin of science. Morality, kindness, social 
duties, obedience to aspiration and the still 
small voice — these things bring pain and 

1 Froude quotes a conspicuous example, an English 
Evangelical hymn: — 

Nothing, either great or small, 

Slothing, sinners, no; 
Jesus did it — did it all 

Long, long ago. 

Cast your deadly doing down, 

Down at Jesus 5 feet; 
Stand in Him, in Him alone, 

Gloriously complete. 



5 o THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

endeavor, and many avoid the pain and 
duty by drowning conscience in the as- 
sumption that science demands material- 
ism, and hence of course determinism. 
Heredity is their new Fate, and Law — with 
a big L — is their new god, — with a little 
g. These people have been taken off with 
a sting of truth, in the following jingle : 

' ' To cut my burden short 
It is rather rough to thwart 
A soul that would propriety pursue ; 
"When I want to be a Saint, 
Says Hereditary Taint, 
Better do a little sinning, and I do." 

The truth, of course, is that any at- 
tempted investigation of ultimate origins 
and causes is utterly futile. The problem 
is beyond our mental reach. Monism may 
be true, or dualism or many other -isms, — 
but we can probably never know which. 
All are at present equally unthinkable. 
Monism, however, I think distinctly im- 
moral, because, shirk it as one may, deny 
it as one will, the inexpugnable fact re- 
mains that in its psychic results monism, 
any conceivable sort or kind of monism, 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 51 

is only another name for fatalism. Out 
of its cruel face stare the hideous eyes of 
determinism, and no human heart can help 
being turned to stone by their gorgon 
glare. All that one can say of dualism, the 
dualism of life and matter, is that it is the 
best provisional or working hypothesis 
that has been offered or that is thinkable. 
So long as spontaneous generation is an 
exploded fallacy, any scientific-minded 
person must admit our hypothesis to be 
the only theory to which the facts will lead 
by the inductive method. It also permits 
and demands freedom, aspiration, energy, 
cooperation with God, religion, hope, etc., 
as the requisites of right character and 
conduct. 

When we pass by strict inference from 
observed facts to the largest justifia- 
ble generalizations concerning non-living 
things, we finally reach the atomic theory 
as the necessary basis of all exact science 
or physics. Although it is called a theory, 
it is strictly an inductive conclusion, the 
foundation of all physical and scientific in- 
vestigation. If one does not admit the 
substantial verity of that induction, there 



52 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

is no use of speech; language itself be- 
comes meaningless, and thought comatose. 
Whatever may be finally determined as to 
the nature of atoms, vibrations, ions, elec- 
trons, etc., we wander in the blank inane 
of psychic emptiness without the laws of 
the atomic theory upon which rest physics, 
dynamics, chemistry, and upon which 
again is based all other knowledge. If one 
think accurately or observe mathematic- 
ally, atoms, whatever their construction or 
nature, are the bases of physical things and 
the causes of physical forces. 

But whether gravitation is explained or 
not, it is unthinkable that matter can have 
been created, or can be annihilated. What- 
ever else is true or false, matter must be 
uncaused, self-existent, eternal and eter- 
nally obedient to the fatalisms of its inher- 
ent nature, displaying no evidence of de- 
sign or purpose, each atom following math- 
ematically and invariably the stresses, pro- 
pulsions, etc., of its conditions, and accord- 
ing to its molecular weight, specific heat, 
etc., etc. The fatalism of matter, the rigid 
necessarianism of the inorganic universe, 
is the truth hidden in and justifying the 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 53 

human belief in fate, the limitation of free- 
will, etc., which no dogmatism or creed has 
ever been able to banish from the mind of 
thinker or of devotee. However free we 
are, or may be, behind the daylight free- 
doms of our sun-blinded eyes, there are the 
billions of stars of limitless and eternal 
fate which the illumined night of reflection 
reveals in the boundless stretches of the 
physical universe. 

Moreover, the infinite extension of this 
physical universe is as certain as gravita- 
tion itself. If there existed anywhere a 
limit to the stars of space, then there would 
be a somewhere-existing center of gravity 
for all the suns of space, no matter if their 
number ran to unwritable strings of fig- 
ures. As infinite time is also an axiom of 
thought, as well as an inference from the 
uncreatedness of matter, however far re- 
moved from the assumed and necessary 
center may have been the supposable 
farthest star, not only itself, but every 
other bit of matter must have long since 
thundered to one central sun. Hence it 
is sure that every star is held relatively 
in its place in the sidereal universe by the 



54 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

infinite number of stars and worlds upon 
every side of it. Its free-will is repre- 
sented by its tiny revolutions, and, per- 
haps, some glimpsed directions of solar 
and stellar motions, but its fate is that of 
a surrounding and absolutely limitless 
stellar host beyond all cognition of the 
imagination or of the mathematical fac- 
ulty. Spectrum analysis makes it certain 
that the suns of space are composed of 
the same kinds of atoms as we have here 
in our own sun, and if, as now seems prob- 
able, matter is simply condensed ether, 
then space by double proof is a plenum, 
and nowhere is there a vacuum. The 
"tragedy of astronomy/ ' the awe-struck 
horror of the "pitiless stars,' ' is thus 
converted into the security of neighborli- 
ness and of physical connection with 
the whole mechanism; no universal cat- 
aclysm or catastrophe is possible. Empti- 
ness gives place to fulness, and our feelings 
of banishment, lostness and orphanage are 
replaced by those of acquaintanceship, 
comprehension, and even to some extent 
of mastery. Cosmic horror is supplanted 
by cosmic admiration and understanding. 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 55 

The woe of mystery ends in the delight of 
comprehensibility. 

But what is this that comprehends, that 
feels and loves, that looks out upon, that 
can will, and that can move by a wish one 
or two hundred pounds of sweet, sensuous, 
mysterious, carnal mechanism? What are 
these others like ourselves that we see, and 
that speak to us? What are these, our 
brothers the animals, who can not speak, 
but in whose lambent eyes we look and 
find a dumb pleading for love, for human- 
ization, and for spiritualization, and whom 
we find essentially one with ourselves? 
What of the grass, the flowers, the grains, 
and the trees, whose fate is bound up with 
ours, and whose true inner being, again, 
is at once recognized by a keen eye as 
identical with that of our own? What, in 
a word, is life? What is that subtile flame 
of soft spirit reining to unity every part 
of our bodies, endowing each with continu- 
ity, obedient even to our unconscious wish, 
and in feeling and intellect rising to self- 
consciousness, to purpose, to the making 
and the mastery of destiny itself? Has 
this any likeness to, or any relationship 



56 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

and unity, conceivable or observable, with 
the matter of the non-living worlds? It is 
logical blasphemy to suggest it, and scien- 
tific nihilism to assert it. 

Any physicist who understands "the 
mechanics of a closed system," any chem- 
ist who knows of the release of energy in 
a disintegrating and simplifying molecule, 
any physiologist who has caught a glimpse 
of the physics of digestion and assimila- 
tion, knows well enough that the physical 
energies of the living organism are gained 
by the utilization of the liberated forces 
of a complex molecule, first anabolized or 
built up by life, then katabolized by the 
same power when and where the liberated 
force is desired. Something like 5,000,000 
blood-cells, it is said, die within us every 
second, and 5,000,000 new ones are created 
and vivified to carry on the work. Thus 
all vitality is supported in its world-work 
by the dissipation of energy released in the 
disintegration of a complex molecule of 
matter. The mechanism of assimilation, 
of heat-production, of movement, of every 
bodily function, is that of the continuous 
indrawing of streams of complex molecules 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 57 

in which are locked condensed atomic mo- 
tilities, of building them to greater com- 
plexity, of extracting their energies by dis- 
integration, and of discarding the refuse 
and the used-up material. To be alive is 
to do that; what does not do this is not 
alive. But it is quite clear that the di- 
rectional power and intelligence which does 
that can never be identified with, is infin- 
itely other than the poor blind fatalistic, 
impassive atoms, molecules, and materials 
thus used. The nail and the hammerer, 
the engine and the engineer, belong to ir- 
reconcilable categories of existence. No 
monist has a glimpse of genuine scientific 
methods. He has not learned the A-B-C 
of science, which is the recognition of dif- 
ferences in observed facts. 

Parenthetically it should be observed 
that in the vegetable world life has learned, 
and in the animal has unlearned, the art 
of building up the relatively simple veg- 
etal protoplasm from inorganic materials. 
The tree or plant takes up the purely me- 
chanical molecules and anabolizes them to 
vitalistic complexity. The animal has lost 
this power, finds it too difficult, or rather 



58 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

unnecessary, and so utilizes the complex 
vegetal protoplasm as the ingestion-mate- 
rial or basis for the still more complex 
bioplasm of the animal cell. Thus, all ani- 
mal and human life depends upon the vege- 
tal world for food and existence. It does 
not follow that this is the only function it 
serves, nor that we have not many other 
relations, ethic, esthetic, etc., with the veg- 
etal world, than that of ruthless food-get- 
ting. 

Now, every mind which is desirous of 
understanding itself and the world, which 
is unhappy in the presence of mysteries 
not necessarily insoluble, soon meets 
the physiologic mystery. "La premiere 
chose," says Pascal, "qui s' off re a Vhom- 
me quand il se regar&e, c'est son corps." 
If one have any genuine scientific animus 
he will speedily advance from the large 
facts of motion, for example, or sexualism, 
to the more intimate and essential ones, 
e. g., of nutrition, nerve-communication, 
and unity, etc. ; and if he is in downright 
earnest he will before long arrive at the 
question of the mechanics of all vital activ- 
ity in and through the cell — the physiologic 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 59 

unit and elemental component of all organs. 
Cytology is the beginning and foundation 
of all genuine philosophy, the suggester 
and controller of all ethics, the way to 
reach vivid, legitimate, and real religion. 
Grasp your religion, your philosophy, your 
esthetics, or your ethics, by deductive 
methods out of the abstractions of your 
own mind (your mind which itself is the 
abstraction of abstractions), and you float 
in the lawless incertitude of ethereal sub- 
jectivism, without the quickening breath of 
oxygenating air to stay your fluttering 
heart, without the earth of reality to sup- 
port your propless feet. Study rather the 
pathology of inflammation, get down your 
microscope and watch the white corpuscles 
in the blood-stream crowd about a wound 
and plunge through the rent vessel- walls 
to repair the damage and heal the part. It 
soon is clear that each blood-cell, and every 
other cell in the body, is ruled from within, 
is an individual which coheres from choice 
and self-sacrifice with others — a million 
here shaping themselves one way, another 
million elongating, or flattening, or harden- 
ing; this billion taking one function, an- 



60 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

other a different function, etc., until thou- 
sands of families tell themselves off to a 
thousand different labors and duties. But 
whatever the work, or shape, or place, 
each cell acts as an individual from within, 
not by constraint from without. Its rul- 
ing power is from its center of life within 
itself. Its nutrition is effected the same 
as that of the body; it draws into itself 
streams of food, accepts some, exhausts 
the force in the complex molecule, utilizes 
the sucked-out force, and excretes the use- 
less debris. Can a bundle of mechanical 
atoms do the like? It is clear that intelli- 
gence, purpose, ethics, self-sacrifice — con- 
trol, in a word — reside at the heart of the 
cell. But as all cells of the organ and 
body ally and sacrifice themselves for a 
common end, the cell-intelligence must find 
a common unity in an intelligence behind 
all cells, whereto all lines of direction lead, 
and whereby all are governed. Life 
reaches control of physical forces by the 
cell-mechanism, and, so far as we know, 
by it solely. No inorganic molecule shows 
any evidence of intellect, design, or pur- 
pose. It is the product solely of math- 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 61 

ematically determinate and invariable 
physical forces. The cell always exhibits 
intellect, design, purpose, ethics, and me- 
chanical genius. Nonliving matter is ut- 
terly fatalistic, externally governed and 
self-satisfied ; the living cell is free, intern- 
ally governed, and finds the end or object 
of its existence elsewhere and elsewhen. 

As we thus observe cells of myriad 
shapes, natures, and functions, each di- 
rected from within, fuse themselves to 
organs, and organs again cohere to form 
the complete animal organism, it com- 
mences to break in upon the wondering 
perception that the cell-mechanism is life's 
method of getting entrance to the nonliv- 
ing world ; moreover, as every cell exhibits 
all the attributes of personality, loyalty, 
self-sacrifice, ingenuity, intellect, far-away 
planning, etc., etc., it grows plainer that 
temporarily the cell is life's domicilium or 
home, that life itself is incarnate in the 
cell. If you wish to say Biologos, or God, 
instead of Life, I heartily agree, and we 
are face to face with the sublime fact of 
biology: The cell is God's instrument and 
mediator in materiality; it is the mechan- 



62 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

ism of incarnation, the word made flesh 
and dwelling among us. 

And this is my criticised dualism. If, 
however, you can satisfy any demand of 
scientific intelligence by identifying the 
materials used, the molecules drawn in, 
sucked of their power, and again thrown 
out, these stupid, brute, fatalistic, dancing 
atoms, with the intelligence, purpose, love, 
ingenuity which uses them as mere tools, — 
then you and I part company. It is not 
very flattering to a watchmaker to say to 
him that he and his tools and his watches 
are fundamentally the same. The watch 
may feel complimented, not its maker. 
Monism is as impious as it is unscientific. 
Let us have done with all the pantheisms, 
materialisms, and idealisms, whose wreck- 
age fills the lumber-rooms of the past. 
The nonliving universe is made up of 
driven atoms in various stages of close 
or wide conglomeration, uncaused, dis- 
crete, eternal, purposeless, fatalistic, be- 
traying no trace of personality either in 
origin or action. The living cell shows 
personality and all its attributes, building 
a complex and marvelous tool out of the 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 63 

dead atoms, and every organism of cells 
in all the world is fused into harmonic 
unity and continuity with every other by 
lines of directional control centering in 
what we represent to ourselves by the 
word God. 

Human personality therefore can only 
be a unity of greater differentiations of 
function, a higher and fuller incarnation 
than the single cell-incarnation. Life, or 
God, is in the cell. It is He incarnate, 
ceaseless, sleepless, absolutely present, in- 
stantly acting. The cell's intelligence is 
His. The human personality is also at 
last Himself and only Himself. Our free- 
dom is his freedom. Our self-conscious- 
ness is made possible by such perfection 
of the organismal mechanism that to it 
may be added the deputization of control, 
denied to the lower or less perfect organ- 
isms by the very fact of their imperfection 
as organisms. But our self-consciousness 
is only a degree of His, largely dependent 
upon our loyalty (i. e., again, upon the 
perfection of the mechanism) in recogniz- 
ing and accepting His designs as our per- 
sonal ideals. 



64 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

His designs — ah, but what are they? 
What is the object of Life ? What is God's 
purpose with us, and in the process of 
cosmic incarnation? It seems somewhat 
strange that philosophers, system-makers, 
they especially of the ethical and religious 
kinds, should have been so indifferent to 
the most important of all questions, the 
object of the world, or of life. A rational 
ethic must, of course, be absolutely con- 
ditional upon an answer to this question. 
To any reader of history or careful ob- 
server of his fellows, it must be plain that 
men often do evil by the most sincere 
obedience to conscience. Men are usually 
willing to do right, indeed do generally 
obey their consciences ; but willingness and 
obedience do not tell what is the right. 
All action that is right in result, as well 
as right in motive, must depend upon really 
carrying out God's wishes, upon what His 
wishes are, or upon what is the final cause, 
as the theologians would say, of existence* 
To me the inorganic universe has no cause, 
either first or final, and any attempt to 
think teleology into lifeless matter will re- 
sult in a whirling dervish-like ecstacy of 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 65 

mind, or an atheistic pessimism. If God 
is responsible for that, I will none of Him ! 
He is then utterly unthinkable, unknow- 
able, and unlovable. 

The old theologians occasionally tackled 
the question, but their answers as to the 
final cause were sad evidences of their dis- 
respect for themselves and for God. If 
"to praise God and to enjoy Him forever,' ' 
be the end and aim of existence, I think 
"existence' ' would better never have wak- 
ened out of Schopenhauer's famous Nichts. 
The truth is, that starting with the deduc- 
tionists' God, omnipotent and responsible 
for the creation and upholding of the en- 
tire universe, there is no conceivable ob- 
ject of existence. We settle back into the 
practical atheism and intellectual nihilism 
of the majority of mankind. The mind 
balks and rebels at too much God, and in 
teaching theism the old " God-drunken' ' 
teachers made atheists, in much the same 
manner as Bishop Butler did, by proving 
too much. I am also profoundly convinced 
that a vast deal of the pessimism and sen- 
sualism of the world is due to the incon- 
ceivability by deductional methods of any 



66 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

object or final cause of the world. So long 
as the Gorgon of an omnipotent Creator, 
responsible for the universe, stands at the 
entrance of the intellectual temple, the very 
blood and marrow of reason is frozen by 
a simple glance of its stony and fatalistic 
eyes. If this is so, then such "theism" 
is criminal. For my part at least, Heaven 
preserve me from this sort of monism? 
From that trance of death-like abstraction 
my dog's nose, thrust under my hand, beg- 
ging for love, brings me safely back to 
reality and sanity with tears in my eyes. 
For, when one of my God's creatures wants 
something, it is He that wants it. 

If we look at the great incarnation-proc- 
ess in its entirety, as a world-phenomenon, 
we find the most inclusive generalization 
to which all of the facts lead up, is that 
by and through the process, Biologos (as 
I call God) is each instant gaining an in- 
creased control of the forces of the non- 
living universe. Every increase in the 
numbers of humanity is per se an added 
victory; but by civilization the very forces 
of the solar system are being harnessed 
and broken to Life's intent and use. 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 67 

Every discovery in mechanics, physics, 
chemistry, and in science of al± kinds, dou- 
bles his control of the forces of the physical 
world. So amazingly rapid is this gain 
in directional control that one almost hes- 
itates to set any limits to our future dom- 
ination over and use of the physical forces 
of the universe. We may yet visit Mars ! 
Every gain is at once put at the service 
of all men for their intellectualization and 
spiritualization. The object of Life, then, 
presents itself to me, at least tentatively, 
as the mastery of physical forces (through 
the mechanism of the cell) for Life's di- 
rectional control, and the rationalizing and 
spiritualization of humanity. Other and 
deeper objects may lie concealed behind 
these plainest ones, but these primary ones 
are patent to eyes that desire to see. The 
glorious words of Christ, startling in their 
prescience, are likewise those of Biologos : 
"I am come that they might have life, and 
that they might have it more abundantly. ' ' 
Fullness of life, perfection of life, control 
of power, these are the things most pro- 
foundly desired by every human heart; 
viewing the mechanism and progress of 



68 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

the incarnation-process they are also pre- 
cisely the things God most desires. 

But to desire things is not to have them 
in the case either of cells, of plants, of ani- 
mals, of men, or of God. The invasion 
of the material world by Biologos shows 
strain, struggle and incompleteness, during 
every instant of history and throughout 
the biologic world. This is the most ap- 
palling and the most evident of all living 
facts. Every cell of every living thing 
that has ever existed or that exists to-day 
is carrying on its function with effort, fore- 
fending disaster, healing hurts, nourishing 
itself with consummate solicitude and fore- 
sight, and fulfilling its duty with loyalty 
and self-sacrifice that is simply divine. 
The same is true of every congeries of cells 
called an organ. Only the physiologist 
and physician can realize the intensity of 
this endeavor. The same is also true of 
the congeries of organs called the individ- 
ual. No weed, grass, tree or animal, but 
that has attained its small degree of per- 
fection by the thousands of mechanisms 
of offense and defense which botany and 
zoology cannot even catalogue, and every 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 69 

one bears the pathetic marks of imperfec- 
tion, enemies, disease, scars, frustrated 
endeavors, and the rest. All archeology 
and history are the records of man's strug- 
gle ; is there one of us to-day in this world 
of 1500 millions who is satisfied and unde- 
siring? And there, soon or late, stands 
certain death awaiting every cell, and every 
individual, whether plant, animal, or man ! 
By the circumvention of sex and repro- 
duction death is cheated of complete vic- 
tory, but at what expense to the process, 
and to the process-maker! But if all 
things that live do so with every instant's 
struggle, if imperfection, want and death, 
stamp every product, is the producer, God, 
then, not finite, and a struggler, all too 
pathetically far from omnipotent ? 

And if so, is His heart not as full (nay 
is it not more full?) as yours of unfulfilled 
desire and thwarted effort? Is not every 
failure his failure, and every success also 
His success? Your suffering is His suf- 
fering, your tragedy certainly is His. 1 

1 Since the above was written, I find in Professor 
Royce's Studies of Good and Evil the following: "The 
only possible answer [to Job's question] is one that 



70 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

e Aoyo's 2ap£ iyivero is the truth of Scrip- 
ture, but how more enormously, more sub- 
limely true it is than the Bible-writers 
dreamed! Every cell of the billions of 
your body is His handiwork, and the com- 
ing to consciousness of the human bundle 
of these cells is His success in perfecting 
the mechanism, and our acceptance of the 
duties of becoming His deputies. Free- 
dom and control are offered us on condi- 
tion of loyalty, and this loyalty is the basis 
and warrant of all rational and practical 
ethics. His plain aim is to extend and 
perfect the incarnation-process ; ethics and 
duty consist simply in helping God, nothing 
else ! The function of intellect consists 
solely in understanding first the material 
upon which and through which God and 

undertakes to develop what I hold to be the immortal 
soul of the doctrine of the divine atonement. The an- 
swer to Job is, God is not in ultimate essence another 
being than yourself. He is the Absolute Being. You 
truly are one with God, part of his life. He is the 
very soul of your soul. And so, here is the first truth: 
When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings, 
not his external work, not his external penalty, not the 
fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal 
woe. In you God Himself suffers, precisely as you do, 
and has all your concern in overcoming this grief." 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 71 

man must both work, and second, the laws 
of vitalized matter, and the adaptation of 
means to the desired end. Esthetics is 
the beautification of the process and de- 
light in it ; and religion is love of the proc- 
ess and its Author. 

"Be ye therefore perfect even as your 
Father which is in heaven is perfect." 
Are these electrifying words of the world's 
greatest teacher longer to remain a mean- 
ingless and stupefying paralyzant of awed 
finiteness? Did Jesus mean anything by 
them? Are not his words usually amazing 
revelations of terrible earnestness and 
reality? If the heavenly Father is the in- 
finite and awful being of philosophy and 
theology, the command of Jesus is simply 
nonsense. But if the heavenly Father is 
the most learned of all physicists and chem- 
ists, the prototype of all chemical synthet- 
ists and physiologists, the most consum- 
mate of all mechanicians and artists, then 
is He the artificer of civilization and the 
"elder brother," whom we can in truth 
imitate and love. It seems clear, there- 
fore, that the beginning of philosophy is 
in physics and chemistry, and the starting- 



J2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

point of all true theology is in physiology. 
God's primary perfection, as seen by in- 
duction, consists in His knowledge and 
control of molecular physics, and the build- 
ing of the organic molecule. The cell, so 
far as we know, is indeed His sole method 
of entrance into matter and His single 
means of control of mechanical forces. 
Those who utterly ignore His first, great- 
est, and continuous method of work are 
surely poor lovers and imitators of Him. 
They are not very consciously striving to 
be perfect as He is perfect. 

God's greatest difficulty and sorrow is 
denutrition and disease. Every living 
thing is thwarted, stunted, scarred, imper- 
fect, and His most wondrous ingenuity is 
to overcome and circumvent the ills that 
beset the evolution and limit the life of 
every organism existing on earth. No- 
body can realize this as can the physiol- 
ogist and physician. From before concep- 
tion or fructification, the strain and the 
eager attention, the every-inst ant's care 
of every cell and of every organic bundle 
of cells, is profoundly devoted to keeping 
up the minute mechanisms of nutrition and 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 73 

in preventing and overcoming harms and 
curing diseases. I have heard that the 
root of a bit of prairie grass has been fol- 
lowed sixty or seventy feet straight down 
through the dry, arid sands to tap a more 
moist stratum, and any physician who has 
seen the human organism struggle with 
disease for a life-time, for several consec- 
utive life-times, — any such physician who 
is an atheist, — well he is a poor physician 
also ! God is the first and the ideal of all 
physicians. All our science is learning 
His methods ; all our art consists in help- 
ing and imitating Him. May we some 
time be as perfect physicians as He is ! 

And thus by induction we at last secure 
a clarifying and enlarging view of the 
world's problem of evil. In its last analy- 
sis evil is but another name for the diffi- 
culty of cellular and organic nutrition. 
What are love and sexualism and all their 
consequent evils but the circumvention of 
organismal and cellular death, the problem 
of the running-down mechanism? Death 
is only the impossibility of making a per- 
petually active cell-mechanism. The indi- 
vidual life is a truce with matter, which 



74 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

will not allow perpetual motion of a sys- 
tem. Sex and regeneration are the devices 
for continuing the truce, and outwitting 
the fatalism of matter. Look at the affair 
closely and it is seen that all war, slavery, 
disease, all evil whatsoever, any question 
of inethicality, is at heart and at < base a 
question of nutrition — cellular, organismal, 
social, national, or cosmic. Every advance 
in civilization is but a partial conquering 
of this nutritional difficulty. All health, 
beauty and joy is the more or less perfect, 
and, alas, temporary solution of the nu- 
tritional problem, a victory of the con- 
structive forces of organic life. Play is 
the expenditure of an overplus of victorious 
force. 

We thus surely reach an adequate con- 
ception of sin and error. To imitate God, 
to be perfect as He is perfect, is the com- 
mand of Christ and of biology. The ideal 
of all human character and the end of all 
endeavor thus become the participation in 
God's work. We are good in so far as 
we are His actual coworkers and helpers ; 
we are good-for-nothing just in so far as 
we fail to help. Sin is the conscious re- 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 75 

fusal to help the incarnation-process, trait- 
orousness to the evolution-ideal. Error is 
failure, from ignorance, selfishness, etc., 
with varying degrees of consciousness, to 
understand what God is doing and how He 
is doing it in this world. To further the 
objects of the process, willingly, obedi- 
ently, lovingly — this is our one sole duty. 
The stupid error of the old subjectivists, 
of the outworn philosophies, monisms and 
deductions, the sin, downright sin, of the 
outlived and antiquated theologies, con- 
sisted in not studying facts, not finding 
and teaching an object of life. Ask any 
one of all your acquaintances what is the 
purpose, end, and aim of existence, and his 
mind is a blank; probably he will think 
you decidedly daft. But ask him to under- 
take a labor that will require years or his 
lifetime, ask him to travel with you to the 
middle of the ocean, or of the Sahara des- 
ert, and he will ask you for what end. 
Now has all this strain and million-year 
endeavor of the biologic process no end in 
view ? God forbid ! But if not, if the neg- 
ative answer of all subjectivism, if the 
silly fuddle of the theologian's answer is 



76 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

allowed, then we end in pessimism and ma- 
terialism, and we get the result we see — 
the poor Asiatic Buddhist scheming to 
undo the incarnation-process, the active 
and sane Caucasian plunging into the mad 
whirl of pleasure-seeking, or the dehuman- 
izing fury of money-getting. At the door 
of the subjectivist, the so-called philoso- 
pher and theologian, was laid the pathetic 
and orphaned foundling of modern misery. 
Science and its civilization had to take the 
refused gift, nurse it in its hospitals, train 
it in its industrial schools, and put it to 
work in its laboratories and workshops, 
all to fit it for a coming and renovated 
future. One Stephen Girard, or one 
Virchow, is of more value to God than the 
combined system-spinners of metaphysics 
and theology since man began to watch the 
whirring wheels of his own thoughts. 

The mechanism of the cell and its nu- 1 
trition constitute, then, the fundamental 
means whereby the incarnation-process is 
carried on. The simplest observation of 
this process as a whole shows an increase 
of the control of the physical forces of the 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 77 

universe, an extension and perfection of 
life. All history exhibits a progressive 
spiritualization or civilization by means of 
the forces gained, and every glance into 
our present world shows this process 
reaching to a future greater control and 
to a rapid progress in knowledge, comfort, 
art, and power placed under the rule of 
Biologos. Again the sublime, prophetic, 
the godlike words recur to the astonished 
memory: "I am come that they might 
have life, and that they might have it more 
abundantly." How closely do true reli- 
gion and true science unite in work and 
ideal! The object of life, of Biologos, is 
plainly the extension and perfection of 
the incarnation-process; it is to dominate 
the dead physical forces of the universe, to 
make them the servants of spirit, to in- 
crease the sum-total of incarnate life, and 
to exhibit the essential qualities of life, 
which are ingenuity, power, love, beauty, 
freedom, etc., so fast and so far as the 
thraldom and inertia and death, the fatal- 
ism and infinities of purposeless matter 
will permit. In a word it is to vivify the 



78 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

objectless world of infinite matter, to thrill 
the dead universe through and through 
with God's own life. 

To aid the process, I repeat again, to 
help God, is the aim of all endeavor, the 
ideal of all ethics, the test of all worth, 
and the decision as to all sin. I had in- 
tended to show how this test will lighten 
and clarify all history, but I fear I have 
already taxed your patience. I wished to 
cast a glance into the night of archeology 
and prehistoric darkness which envelops 
our noon of to-day. For example, the 
traveler in some dense tropical or semi- 
tropical forest comes upon a hint of the 
old crime and error in the shapo of a 
crumbling and ruined palace, built untold 
thousands of years ago by the enslaved 
energies of millions of men, for the greed 
and pride of one, or for mistaken worships 
and useless ends. The final purposes of 
the incarnation-process were not served by 
these nations or by their endeavors, and 
the ruins were covered with the better life 
of vegetation. The pyramids and the 
sphinx of Egypt, — for what were they 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 79 

builded? The wastes of sand at their 
bases are not more purposeless. 

The purposelessness of Asiatic life, the 
twilight glooms in which our historic eyes 
lose clear sight, reveal the same disregard 
for the extension and perfection of the 
evolutionistic life-process, and we watch 
all such lethargic nations sleeping out their 
half -failed and now rapidly dying life. In 
clear-eyed Greece, History seems startled 
to a semiconsciousness, and to have looked 
about her like Dore's frightened young 
monk ; but she was careless of the other, of 
the slave, on whose back was burdened her 
labor, and of the "barbarian" she scorned; 
she failed to catch the hint of induction, 
obey the duty of observing, did not grasp 
the offered hand of Science, dreamed her 
platonic dreams, scoffed and laughed with 
her Aristophanes, — and was conquered by 
the more virile Eoman. Hard-eyed, self- 
ish-hearted Eome conquered the world, 
taught it a rough lesson of justice and of 
power, but at last became gluttonous; the 
cosmic parasite sucked the juices of her 
host too cruelly, and the freedom-loving, 



80 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

forest-bred Hun struck the tyrant a death- 
blow. "The ghost of the old Roman Em- 
pire sitting on its own grave/ ' as Catholic- 
ism has been not untruthfully described, 
formed at least a sort of carrier of the 
classic result, a transmitter of the book of 
wisdom to the modern nations. Spain re- 
fused the wisdom, and, in the ruthless 
despoliation of intoxicated selfishness, 
committed every crime against the biologic 
process that was conceivable. God's 
splendid irony is shown in the fact of her 
handing over to the rulers of the very 
world which she had discovered, and had 
ruined with rapine, the keys of misused 
power, with the unconfessed Peccavi of 
callousness, ineptitude, and defeat. The 
Teuton again showed his warrant to life 
from the God of Life. France forgot the 
nutrition-lesson, and despoiled her serfs — 
82 per cent of the productiveness of her 
worse than enslaved Jacques Bonhommes 
being demanded for her Versailles and its 
hideous gaieties. Again the parasites for- 
got the simplest lesson of self-interest in 
the treatment of their host, and the mani- 
acal fury of the Revolution was a fitting 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 81 

but fatal atonement of Bourbon sin. She 
then turned her self-torture upon the out- 
side world, and the Teutons again had to 
teach the old lesson to the Napoleonic for- 
getters of God. In reducing her birth-rate 
to an equality with her death-rate, this 
demimondaine of the nations has given the 
most downright insult to the incarnation- 
process, and the Dreyfus exhibition of dis- 
honorable " honor" reveals the swiftly- 
coming and deserved end. Thus the 
Greek and Latin type of character, built 
upon parasitism and the indifference to 
and spoliation of the organic sources of its 
life-process, is passing away, and the dem- 
ocratic Teuton, the Anglo-Saxon, has al- 
ready inherited the world. 

And why? Because he furthers, not 
despoils, aids, not hinders, the incarnation- 
process. This is the light that reveals a 
real philosophy of history; send its search- 
ing rays out among all the tangles and 
mysteries of history and it reveals the 
reasons of failure and the causes of suc- 
cess. Does the average of a nation's ac- 
tivity and character, under the existing 
circumstances, conduce to the general ex- 



82 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

tension and perfection of biologic evolu- 
tion? If so it dominates and inherits from 
the less helpful the control of the lands 
and opportunities. A volume could be 
filled with illustrations of this truth. One 
alone must suffice: Why is England the 
best and most successful colonizer the 
world has ever had? Solely because she 
encourages the people she subjugates to 
fuller and larger life. She does not rob 
them of the products of their labor, and 
she forces them to be just to one another ; 
that is, to allow each and all to participate 
in the extension of the great life-movement. 
God is a free-trader. 

And that is the lesson also of all institu- 
tions. Do they help in the incarnation- 
process? If so, they live, in spite of all 
their lesser evils. Do they not so help 
God? They die, despite a thousand other 
heavenly virtues and innocences. From 
birth, asceticism is stung with certain 
death. Eeligion itself, if it forget the nu- 
tritional and life-increasing duty, must be 
buried out of sight of living things. 

Eoman law, all laws that men put in 
force or obey, are but corollaries of the 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 83 

command of Biologos, to help Him in His 
work of life-extension and life-perfection. 
The legislatures or the judges who fail to 
follow that Ariadne-thread miss their way 
— fail in their vocation, and their labor 
comes to naught. 

Only when medicine got its microscope 
and began studying the intimate processes 
of cellular structure, cellular laws, cellular 
pathology, and physiologic chemistry, only 
now, that is to say, has medicine become 
the ally of the divine Pathologist and the 
coworker of the heavenly Healer. Only 
when theology descended from metaphysi- 
cal moonshine to vital social duties, — that 
is, only when theology became religion, has 
it been vivifying, useful, and shown 
growth-power. 

Only when speculative philosophy be- 
came science, when Hegel was renounced 
and Darwin born, did light begin to come 
into the chaos of systematic thought, and 
the intolerable mystery of being. 

Only when charity — selfish, subjective 
charity — became objective and scientific — 
only when it studied the thing it did — only 
then did charity begin to lessen instead of 



84 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

increase the very suffering with which it 
busied itself. ' ' ' Sound men, ' said Justice 
to Charity, 'are made cripples by the use 
of your crutches.' " 

Only when science began studying the 
world of plants and animals did we begin 
to know of the unity of all life, of the 
interdependence of man and the lower 
forms. We are only now becoming con- 
scious that we have duties to trees, ethical 
relations with insects, and interests in 
birds, that may not be ignored. 

Lastly, only when man began to study 
and imitate God's organic ingenuity were 
brought forth those modern inventions — 
the steamship, railroad, the printing-press, 
and all the rest — whereby the whole prob- 
lem of nutrition, the feeding of the world, 
the prevention of famine, of localized war 
and evil, and the spread of intelligence, 
have been secured. Modern commerce and 
civilization are in essence and result pri- 
marily the mechanisms of securing the 
organic unity of the world, of preventing 
localized waste, of forfending the nutri- 
tional evils of isolation. 

With this key of all ethics in our hands, 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 85 

we may also open the closed mysteries of 
many social contradictions about us to-day. 
The institution or custom that hinders or 
does not help toward extending and per- 
fecting the biologic process is as surely 
doomed as it is sure that God lives. Lux- 
ury, for example, is often but another name 
for parasitism, of eating more than is pro- 
duced by the eater. Life will crush the 
ruthless seizor of the products of other 
men's lives for personal consumption. 
Wealth is per se no sin, nor is it necessarily 
a proof of sin, but the use of wealth for 
self-glory or self-satisfaction, regardless 
of whence or how it came, or whither it 
ieads — that is mad disloyalty to the in- 
carnation-process. We must not be de- 
ceived: God has a cunning way of using 
self-seekers for the common good, and 
tricking them out of their game ; moreover, 
it is the equivalence of service that is the 
point, not the expenditure of effort or cor- 
respondence with false ideals of duty. One 
hour of "duty" may yield an overplus of 
good above fifty years of "sin," or fifty 
years of duty may be lost in the ruin of 
one moment's error. The tree of life can 



86 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

only be judged by its fruit, and one saved 
seed or grass-blade may be the means of 
covering with vegetation a devastated 
country. 

One of the ominous signs of lethal lux- 
ury is that the energies of the life-process 
are being too much extracted, and too self- 
ishly used by the so-called "ladies" of 
fashionable, or would-be fashionable, life. 
Millions of American women are fast learn- 
ing some deadly sins, aspiring to doless- 
ness, irresponsibility, hysteria, childless- 
ness — "ladyhood." Much of the guilt of 
France will be forgiven her because her 
women have learned in one way or another 
that muscular action is the condition of 
health, and that responsibility develops 
mental power. We shall have yet to pay 
dearly for our cruel kindness and morbid 
chivalry to women. 

And for the political leaders who do not 
lead, for the demagogic statesmen, for the 
bosses who through bribery rule for them- 
selves and their "pals," not for the people 
— for these are we not already paying a 
high price? For imperialism when we 
cannot govern a few Indians, or even our- 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 87 

selves, for millions of disfranchised men 
in a democratic country with a fifteenth 
amendment, for extension of rotten gov- 
ernment over a thousand or two islands — 
what indeed shall we not yet have to pay 
for these and for many such things ? 

For governing the personal life, for the 
guidance of conduct there is no rule so 
comprehensive or so comprehensible, none 
so applicable by each, as this of the duty 
of cooperating with God, of aiding Him in 
His biologic work. All accepted ethical 
laws are but corollaries of it, and the sim- 
plest mind can at once test the virtue or 
sin of an act or temptation by this touch- 
stone. The decalogue is the expression of 
a few simple phases of it, and codified law 
is a reaching out towards its logical and 
actual validities. Conscience tells us to 
do right ; but only study of the incarnation- 
process can tell us what is the right thing 
we should do. Increase and replenish the 
earth is, for instance, the primal command 
to ameba and to man, and the man or the 
people that too generally disobeys, that 
cheats sexualism of its object, that makes 
marriage an affair of money and bargain- 



88 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

ing, that legalizes prostitution within or 
without marriage — that person or nation 
is doomed. Individuation, or individual- 
ization — self-dependence — is a fundament- 
al law of the biologic process, but com- 
munism, socialism, too much paternalism 
in government, too much "charity" and 
sentimentalism — all have their condemna- 
tion in a biologic necessity none may wisely 
ignore or safely seek to cheat. 

Into the process of organic evolution 
there has been injected one quality which 
on any ground of materialism or utility is 
unaccountable. Whenever it has been pos- 
sible, beauty has been added, and even 
when it has positively endangered the proc- 
ess itself. A few years ago a single 
scarlet tanager visited my country home, 
but now he comes no more. There is some- 
thing far more and other in the flower than 
is demanded for plant-propagation, — nay, 
to bring the matter to its last analysis, 
the chromatic sensations of the eye are in- 
finitely more sweet and wonderful than are 
required to differentiate objects by ethe- 
real vibrations, and sound is far beyond 
the suggestion of air-waves. Thus Biol- 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 89 

ogos is the greatest of all artists, the first 
lover and maker of beauty. What theology 
has so brought Him to men's minds ? That 
beauty has been added to the incarnation- 
process as a pure gratuity, and not seldom 
to the harming of that process, is more 
than a hint that once this process is better 
assured and perfected, it will be literally 
flooded with a fulness of that divine radi- 
ance of smile and benediction whereof we 
have little dreamed. The tolerance of sin 
and a seeming divinely artistic careless- 
ness of what is conventionally called moral- 
ity might suggest that the great Life- 
Lender cares even more for beauty than 
for so-called ethics. Surely Puritanism's 
conception of Him is very different from 
that of the naturalist. 

Again let me quote from Jesus an- 
other astounding and wondrous command : 
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with 
all thy mind;" I take it that means with 
all thy emotional nature, with all thy spir- 
itual nature, and with all thy intellectual 
nature. With the best will in the world 
it is utterly and absolutely impossible for 



90 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

any human soul to obey that order who con- 
ceives of God as the " great first cause 
least understood," of Pope, or in the way 
the philosophers and theologians demand. 
It is a psychic impossibility to love an om- 
nipotent God, and no one ever did. Jesus 
and St. Francis loved God, but not the God 
of the creed-makers, nor of the metaphysic 
folk. No monist who has the faintest con- 
ception of what monism means can have 
the slightest emotion of affection for the 
"infinite maker of heaven and earth." 
Jehovah is a supremely unlovable and un- 
lovely being. "When I pretended to believe 
in Him I only feared Him, and when I quit 
believing in Him my concealed hatred of 
Him became conscious and rational. To 
love, we must feel the affection of the be- 
loved one within, about, and over us, as a 
helpful, thoughtful spirit of tenderness, 
thrilling us with sweetest pride; we must 
also know, feel, see, and realize the very 
being of the loved one as like unto us, as 
finite, suffering, self-sacrificing, planning, 
tirelessly patient — in a word as like our 
best self in all essential nature and char- 
acter. Allah, Jehovah, the absolute, the 



BIOLOGIC BASIS 91 

unconditioned, the creator and upholder of 
the universe, etc., etc., is not such a being, 
and is a figment of the unintelligent, awe- 
struck imagination. Anthropomorphism 
is necessary to the conception of such a 
being and an anthropomorphic god is an 
ungod, a pitiable device of mental inca- 
pacity, and the product of mystical sub- 
jectivism. There is no fatherliness in him 
or to be got into him. To love God with 
our intellects is not to neglect His entire 
work in biologic evolution, not to ignore 
His purposes as revealed in the incarna- 
tion-process. Only the scientist loves God 
with his intellect. 

But if we look with open eyes out into 
the world, first of our own marvelous bod- 
ies, and then of the splendid crowding of 
a million species of other living forms ; if 
we behold the unrolling and the progress 
of these living forms from the primitive 
biologic ages to the present time; if we 
understand even partly the cytologic mech- 
anism of this incarnation-process, and that 
all of it is reined to unity and comprehen- 
sibility by the fact that it is our Father's 
very life, lent to each, and welling up within 



92 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

every one of us ; if we feel that duty is His 
call to help Him, and beauty and love His 
rewards for our help — ah, then, we can 
love, nay, we cannot help loving God with 
all our heart, with all our spirit, and with 
all our intellect. 



CHAPTER III 

MATEKNAL LOVE IN ORGANIC EVOLUTION * 

In his address before the British Asso- 
ciation Lord Salisbury stated anew the 
three great mysteries to the solution of 
which science has in vain directed her at- 
tention. The origins of atoms, of ether, 
and of life, are to-day the most utter mys- 
teries. To account for them no human 
mind has framed even the faintest concept 
worthy of consideration. We have only 
the merest hints of the possibility of ex- 
planation of gravitation; concerning elec- 
tricity we are getting only a little better 
idea; but as to physiologic chemistry our 
little knowledge serves only to make our 
great ignorance more frightful. All ori- 
gins of things are shrouded in impenetrable 
mystery, and our philosophies are but weak 

i Read before the Wistar Biological Association, 
Philadelphia, Dec. 14, 1894; The Philadelphia Associa- 
tion of Kindergartners, April 7, 1896, etc. 

93 



94 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

and sorry attempts to widen a little the 
light-space about us. No philosophy and 
no religion explains finalities, and all ef- 
forts end only in resolving many lesser 
mysteries into fewer great mysteries. The 
conception of Biologos, incoming light and 
love, entering inorganic worlds and matter 
as a great incarnation-principle and spirit- 
ualizing force, electrifies and quickens the 
mental, imaginative, and moral man as 
none other ; but, of course, it too ends only 
in a little broadening of the light-way about 
our darkness-encircled lives. 

But it seems to me that so far as con- 
cerns the individual manifestations of life, 
we may and we must differentiate clearly 
between the love of one's own life and the 
love of the life of one's descendants. The 
cuckoo bird has not enough strength of the 
maternal instinct to build a nest and in- 
cubate her own eggs. In pigeons the male 
has a far stronger maternal instinct than 
the female, and in some other birds the 
male has resolutely to fight for and defend 
the eggs from the destructive habits of the 
female. Some animals will expose them- 
selves to danger, even die most heroically 



MATERNAL LOVE 95 

in defending their young, whilst the kan- 
garoo mother, it is said, will, when hotly 
pursued, drop one or more of her little 
ones to lighten her load. In human life, 
also, as we well know, some people care lit- 
tle for children, even for those of their 
own flesh and blood, whilst others will sac- 
rifice their own lives with most pathetic 
heroism for the education and up-bringing 
of their young. 

It therefore appears to me plain that we 
should distinguish sharply between self- 
love and child-love. Fundamentally, I 
doubt not, they proceed from one ultimate 
unity, but in biologic manifestation they 
may be considered as two distinct exhibi- 
tions or phases of the life-force. One is 
devoted to the saving of the individual life, 
the other to the perpetuation of life in 
new individuals. It is perhaps easy to 
recognize the one as a blind, purposeless 
force, but the incoming of maternal love is 
not thus to be accounted for. 

I have been forced to use the term ma- 
ternal love in default of a better one to 
express an unnamed fact or generaliza- 
tion of facts much larger than that of 



96 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

simple maternity. In many animals we 
find the father taking upon himself many 
of the duties usually fulfilled by the mother, 
and at all times the purposes and results 
of the genesial instinct are carried out 
by an intrinsically-interwoven and corre- 
spondent series of duties of both parents. 
Moreover, if we descend to the vegetable 
world the eye that is trained to observe 
facts rather than the accepted wordings 
and ideas of facts, sees everywhere that the 
phenomena of reproduction, whether in 
anemophilous, entomophilous, or crypto- 
gamic orders, are really asexual, and the 
plants or trees themselves have no funda- 
mental morphologic differences of struc- 
ture due to sexualism. Indeed, the so- 
called "male" and "female' ' organs are 
often produced by the same plant, and 
even by the same twig and the same flower. 
I have racked my brain to find or invent 
a term that should indicate the large bi- 
ologic instinct that prepares the organs for 
reproduction, that begets, and that cares 
for the new being after it is begotten, 
whether it be in the plant, the animal, or 
the human world. We have observation of 



MATERNAL LOVE 97 

a profound and unitary force that directly 
or indirectly dominates all organic life dur- 
ing almost every hour of adult existence. 
In the plant-world every function pertains 
to or ends in seed-production, and just as 
a father horn-bill reduces himself to a 
skeleton and utter exhaustion in getting 
and carrying food to his mate and nest- 
lings, just as a human parent wears life 
out in heroic sacrifice for beloved children, 
just exactly so will a tree under like dis- 
advantageous conditions of nutriment com- 
mit suicide in the production of seeds. An 
Indian mother, in order to rescue her baby 
a few feet away, crawls from behind the 
rock protecting her from the guns of 
United States soldiers. She knows the act 
may bring a bullet in her brain, but she 
saves the baby and dies. A hen in a burn- 
ing barn gathers her chickens beneath her 
and is burned to a statuesque cinder, but 
the singed chicks are saved by the dead 
mother-body. Is it not the same divine 
love that filled both hearts ? Is there any- 
thing else in the world which unites and 
holds in one all living things? I pity one 
who does not see in such things the living 



98 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

God instantly present and profoundly in- 
terested in carrying on his biologic world. 

There is one silent, subtle, palpitant pang 
and power of love that thrills through all 
organic life, that murmurs in all living 
things, and swells and sings its unheard 
song in the inmost hearts of grass, rose, or 
tree ; of cow, tiger, or bird ; of man, maid, 
or mother, — all straining eye and hope to- 
ward the renewed young world to come. 
It is this great supernatural force for which 
I would find a name applicable to all kinds 
of life and all phases of its function. In its 
purest and sweetest quality it is mother- 
love, and so in order to give it a naming 
we may call it that. But I would wish 
that the connotation may not be forgotten 
that it is also father-love as well, and that 
it is one and identical with that beautiful 
power which makes the pigeon turn the 
eggs upon which she sits, that makes the 
grass bloom, and the bee to seek the bloom. 

Possibly some of the more "scientific" 
of you were a little startled when I used 
the word "supernatural." It has been 
quite the fashion among a certain class of 
good folk to think that anything named 



MATERNAL LOVE 99 

scientific must not have aught to do with, 
such foolish old used-up words. Indeed, it 
is supposed that science is wholly given 
to explaining things by the agency of phys- 
ical strains and stresses, by reactions and 
reflexes, mechanic laws and natural selec- 
tions, struggles for existence, and all that. 
It positively makes some people purple 
with rage if one dares to suggest that there 
may be such a thing as " vital force," or 
"soul," and a hint as to the possible ex- 
istence of divinity, either in man or above 
him, elicits a pitying contempt of you that 
freezes the very circumambient air. Well, 
well ! These are very wise people indeed, 
but the birds will sing and build nests after 
these brethren are gone to their agnostic 
heaven. Even they have their uses in a 
world of incongruous and changeful condi- 
tions ! 

Science, I take it, is, chiefest of all things, 
the unprejudiced, open-eyed observation 
and systematization of facts ; the construc- 
tion to be put upon them, the meaning of 
facts, is another matter, and differs some- 
what according to the person who philoso- 
phizes. Facts are very patient, uncom- 



ioo THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

plaining things ; very pliant and compliant, 
at least for a time; they bear a deal of 
strange philosophizing over and about 
them, very meekly. Some people have 
been known to ignore them entirely, and 
yet the patient facts did not worry or stop 
existing. And those who thus falsely con- 
strue, or who thus ignore, are quite happy 
also. All things have their compensations, 
and it would be a great pity if dogmatism 
and atheism were denied the compensation 
at least of self-satisfaction. 

The criticism of much that passes under 
the name of science, and the fault of many 
so-called scientists, is lack of sympathy. 
It is only a keen sense of love, interest, 
and fellow-feeling, that gives that alert use 
of the imagination that leads to a knowl- 
edge of the truth. The collator of facts 
with the light only of cold reason and in- 
tellect will never find lots of facts in the 
world. 

It begins slowly to break, even upon the 
most dry-as-dust scientist, that there are 
some things not dreamed of in the evolu- 
tion-philosophy, and the suggestion may 
not bring danger to the suggester that the 



MATERNAL LOVE 101 

fight to death for the supremacy of the 
deer herd is not an unqualified necessity 
from the axioms of the "struggle for ex- 
istence," nor from the "law of the reac- 
tion of the organism to the environment.' ' 
If the "environment" of maidenly beauty 
in Juliet begets "the reaction" in Eomeo's 
fancy of springtime love, whence it may 
be asked, whence Julia and her beauty? 
Or, to put the question in another form: 
Does not the stupidest intelligence catch 
hint from the universality, the self-sacri- 
fice, and the power of the maternal instinct 
in every living organism, weed, insect, or 
human, that there is purpose and signifi- 
cance poured down into these beings from 
above, not growing out of them from any 
need or logic of present circumstance, or 
from any demands of their organisms, con- 
sidered as single and self-sufficient me- 
chanisms? Does the "environment," or 
any so-called "law," or any so-called ex- 
planation of science, show why these bil- 
lions of ever renascent beings should spend 
every energy of their lives in producing 
and caring for new beings to take their 
places ? Why should we, animals and men, 



102 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

care a fig whether our places are taken or 
not? The sexual and maternal instinct 
holds masterly reign and control of the 
soul of every biologic thing, and gives the 
instant and incontrovertible lie to the libel- 
ous chatter that all is selfishness, all is me- 
chanic, adamantine law and purposeless 
change in our life below. Without the su- 
pernatant ocean of divine life and love 
behind it, the miraculous tide of maternal 
love could not infill and inthrill the tendrils 
and hearts of all living things, any more 
than, on a thousand miles of shore without 
the throbbing gush of ocean-tide, would a 
million little bays and inlets be filled and 
bathed with flashing wave and liquid life. 
When not thus full-flooded with the tide 
of love, the little empty estuaries of our 
individual lives are occupied in panting for 
its future coming, in mourning that it does 
not come, or in pensive memories of its 
past blessedness. 

But possibly the hard-eyed is disgustedly 
muttering that this is all poetry and non- 
sense. Give us, he is probably saying, give 
us something scientific, something about 
"nature red with tooth and claw;" about 



MATERNAL LOVE 103 

bones; about protoplasm; dying planets; 
the pump-like action of the heart ; and re- 
flexes, and natural selection, and the sur- 
vival of the fittest. And to the hard-eyed 
I might make answer that the truth of 
poetry is truer than the truth of science; 
that teeth and claws are very beautiful 
structures and serve glorious purposes; 
that bones were made by Biologos, and 
when dead are excellent objects of study 
for the hard-eyed ones; that none of us 
know anything about protoplasm except 
that it is living and mysterious ; that 
neither of us know anything about dead 
planets ; that natural selection is half -lie, 
half-truth, and that the survival of the "un- 
fit" is a wonderful fact. 

In all seriousness, and with the most 
sober scientific resolution, I contend that 
among the philosophies and sciences of the 
universe, whether idealistic or material- 
istic, the role of maternal love is either un- 
recognized entirely, or held in too light 
estimation. The term, "struggle for ex- 
istence," for example, has been much 
talked about, and has been supposed to be 
the fundamental explanation of the phe- 



104 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

nomena of organic life, and with natural 
selection, to furnish the solution of the rid- 
dles of organic evolution. But in most 
prosaic literalness, can any one not see that 
the distinguishing and determining charac- 
teristics, both in morphology and physi- 
ology, have been more dominated by the in- 
stant and ceaseless influence of the instincts 
pertaining to reproduction? Can any one 
doubt that the progress of evolution, that 
the possibility and actuality of civilization 
have been instigated by the upworking and 
the outworking of the sexual passion, and 
the desire to find houses and food and place 
for the little ones? It is maternal love 
alone that has produced all the ideals and 
actualities of Beauty and Esthetics that we 
have; and so art, novel, drama, society, 
and ambition are the creations of this mys- 
terious power. 

In the plant-world every phase of form 
or function exists as a product of the strain 
toward inflorescence and seed-production. 
The trunks of the forest monarchs are the 
props of the flower to raise it high in air 
where the sun may reach and ripen, and 
where the winds may catch the pollen and 



MATERNAL LOVE 105 

carry it to waiting mates. Every form of 
leaf, every shape of growth, every colora- 
tion and build of flower pertain to the one 
end and aim of existence. Think of the 
inexhaustible ingenuity, the millionfold de- 
vices for scattering seeds. Every sort of 
balloon conceivable has been made by the 
cunning mother-trees for wafting their 
babes to far-away nourishing resting- 
places. My friend, Lafcadio Hearn, tells 
me of the ceiba tree in the West Indies, 
which bursting its pod like a gun, floats its 
white-winged seeds like a snow-storm over 
a city, and when they settle, quickly must 
the natives clear every one off the roofs, 
for if a single one lodges it will wreck and 
crush the house with its prolific roots. 
The natives think the tree has personality, 
like animals or men, and if you wish one 
of the trees cut down you must make your 
wood-cutter drunk in order to get him to 
do it. 

Some of these tree-mothers surround 
their little ones with such impervious shells 
that they float and drift with tides and cur- 
rents for weeks and months, and yet re- 
tain their life and growth-power till 



106 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

washed ashore. There are hairs, spines, 
and hard shells to protect ; acid juices and 
poisons to sting and harrow; husks and 
hooks and spears to cut and hurt; and 
thousandfold devices for getting the better 
of the curious or the hungry. Some make 
hooks and claws that catch any passing 
animal, and who, most tormented, as all 
boys and dogs well know, must carry them 
far and wide. But the birds, too, are great 
helpers. Darwin found that a clump of 
dried mud weighing nine grains, from the 
leg of a partridge, and which had been kept 
for three years, contained seeds from 
which he raised eighty-two distinct plants. 
Especially in eating the seeds for the sake 
of the fruit, the seeds preserving their vi- 
tality, the birds, as also animals, are great 
helpers in the distribution of the flora of 
the world. If you think that in nest-build- 
ing a swallow probably travels about 400 
miles a day, and in migration (also for 
love's sake) birds travel straight away 
from 500 to 1000 miles a day, we see how 
great must have been the influence of birds 
in plant-distribution. A curious and purely 
accidental function of the birds is the 



MATERNAL LOVE 107 

chance stocking of lakes and rivers above 
high falls with fish, which, caught below, 
escape from claws or bill as the birds seek 
their nests, and dropping into these high, 
remote waters, people them with their kind ; 
the life within and about the water in such 
localities is often thus entirely readjusted. 
But I wish to call attention to a fact, 
our familiarity with which leads, as usual, 
to a forgetfulness of its far-reaching im- 
portance and significance. There are few 
people, even those who know better, who 
do not mistake a seed's stored-up supply 
for the seed itself. The seed may or may 
not be nutritious, but even if it is so, the 
true seed constitutes the infinitesimal part 
of what we roughly call the seed. The 
great bulk of every grain or seed is com- 
posed of a stored-up stock of concentrated 
nutriment clustered about the true seed, 
and upon which it feeds whilst springing 
its rootlets downward and its leaflets up- 
ward. Thus the bread, the potato, the ap- 
ple we eat, is the food that has been 
cunningly prepared by the mother-plant 
for its offspring to use whilst it is getting 
its own organs of food-supply ready for 



108 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

their work. The yolk-sac of the fish or 
the egg of the bird is exactly the same 
sort of a contrivance. 

But a remarkable deduction is to be 
made from all this, a deduction that is 
perfectly evident when we think of it and 
realize it, but it is a deduction that many 
of us seldom or never make. It is this: 
It is of course, self-evident, that the entire 
animal world, including the human, is 
wholly dependent upon the vegetable for 
food, and for the means of continuing its 
existence. Without the nutrient material 
furnished by the vegetable kingdom, 
the animal kingdom would at once die of 
starvation. But now consider well the im- 
plication of the fact, that it is entirely by 
means of nutriment stored up by plantsi 
to nourish their young, that, as it were, 
stolen by the animal world enables it to 
live. In other words, it is that great cos- 
mic, regenerative force, biologic maternal 
love, that has been ingenious enough to 
manufacture concentrated food with the 
necessary "keeping" qualities, and capa- 
ble of supporting the life of plants and 
of animals. Their food is our food ; what 



MATERNAL LOVE 109 

nourishes the vegetable children nourishes 
the animal children. Thus we under- 
stand, in passing, why chloroform and 
other drugs affect plants exactly as they 
affect us. Driven by the spur of solicit- 
ousness and love for its young, the plant 
has found out the great secret of food- 
formation. In this connection it is nec- 
essary to add a word as to the food of man 
derived from the animal. The flesh of ani- 
mals is ultimately derived from grass and 
fruits and seeds, and this muscular tissue 
is thus itself the very product of the sub- 
tile, silent weaver of life we have called 
maternal love. The most perfect foods of 
man, milk and eggs, products of double 
distillation in the cellular alembic of ma- 
ternal life, this wonderful strained white 
blood and living flesh, — what can we say 
of these works of the divine physiologic 
chemist? If we have grateful hearts and 
seeing minds, we can only thank and rec- 
ognize the hand that fashioned and that 
reaches them to us, as the hand of God, 
who keeps up the repeopling of the world, 
and hence, who sees well to it that his little 
ones should be fed. 



no THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

Although perhaps logically, and you will 
say also rhetorically out of place, I can- 
not forbear at this point to interject a 
word as to our care and treatment of hens 
and cows. Please do not smile at the sud- 
den transition. When seen with the eyes 
of science, or with those of pure sympathy, 
there is nothing about living things that is 
not beautiful and winning and dignified. 
This great question of the willing obedi- 
ence, loyalty, and service of the animal 
world to the human world, constantly 
arouses in sensitive hearts a multitude of 
painful thoughts. From every prolific 
grain or fruit, from dog and horse, es- 
pecially from every maternal organism 
there run back to the divine center reins 
of guidance and control which ensure loy- 
alty, obedience, and service to a common 
"dim, far-off, unseen event.' ' Else why 
the continued giving of milk when the calf 
has gone, why the continuous egg-produc- 
tion by the nonincubating mother? Ani- 
mals are not so stupid as that ! Dairy-folk 
well know the difficulty of getting cows to 
"give down" when they are maltreated, 
when the food is not good, or when de- 



MATERNAL LOVE in 

prived of their calves. Livingstone speaks 
of the African cows as especially "bad" in 
this respect, and that only "milk-fever" 
will compel them to give their milk. The 
milkers in the Scottish highlands used to 
have peculiar songs which made their cows 
generous. The hen and the cow are the 
most loyal of man's helpers and purveyors, 
and yet it is grievously shocking how un- 
grateful we are to them. We are only be- 
ginning to learn that our self-interest 
commands us to care for cows better, but 
even now their suffering from cold, the 
carelessness of farmers as to their food 
and water, the filth in which they live, is a 
disgrace both to our selfishness and to our 
humanity. If human mothers would only 
think of what these other mothers endure 
and how they are abused, there would be 
some hope that the milk given human babes 
would soon be purer, freer from disease, 
and yielded by a healthier and happier 
animal. It is known that violent emotion 
poisons human milk ; why also may not the 
beatings and abuse of the cow change her 
milk harmfully? Babies, human and ca- 
nine, have died in convulsions soon after 



ii2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

nursing when the mother had just been 
furious with anger or emotion. It may be 
confidently stated that, fed, housed and 
treated as eows should be, and the milk 
cared for as it should be, there would be 
little enough profit to the dairyman if milk 
were furnished by him at twenty cents a 
quart. But it will probably require the 
scourges of tuberculosis and various dis- 
eases to teach us the little lesson that the 
commonest human sympathy should long 
ago have taught. The same thought runs 
out as regards our egg-supply. 

Let me extend my parenthesis by a word 
or two of advice as to teaching children 
sympathy for and fellow-feeling with ani- 
mals. Enlist every child's interest in do- 
mestic pets and make young naturalists of 
them as soon as possible. But guard 
against making them mere collectors of 
dead animals. It is living not dead biol- 
ogy that quickens the sensibilities and 
deepens the child's conception of the world. 
Let him learn physiology rather than anat- 
omy, psychology rather than neurology. 
What is needed is the lightning-like glance 
of intellectualized sympathy (at least the 



MATERNAL LOVE 113 

sympathy) flashed among the play and 
functions and relations of all palpitant life. 
Trained scientists are better museum- 
makers than children. Don't let the child 
kill and delude himself that that is science 
or biology. So soon as a child under- 
stands anything it can understand the 
pretty story of Mohammed cutting off the 
flaps of his coat in order not to disturb his 
kitten sleeping upon it. The animal child 
and the human child have a vast deal in 
common. There is nothing humanity 
needs more than to learn the duty of kind- 
ness and sympathy for all animal life. 
Have a multiplicity of domestic pets. Let 
children almost live in the Zoological Gar- 
dens. Beware of a person who doesn't 
like animals; something is deeply wrong 
with such a person. 

Let Lubbock and Eomanes wait for older 
heads. It is a strange family that does not 
think its cat and dog the most remark- 
able and lovable cat and dog in the world. 
Every pet will show animal spirit strug- 
gling toward the human, dumbly begging 
for human sympathy and help; and, too, 
there frequently occur phenomena that 



ii 4 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

make us shiver as if we should look into 
the sky and see great divine eyes beckon- 
ing ; facts that point to the unity of all life, 
infallible signs of the dependence of the 
body upon spirit, — soul and sentiment pen- 
etrating sense and flesh like hidden elec- 
tricity. The anesthetics we use in surgery 
paralyze plant-metabolism and action, as, 
e. g., in the sensitive plant ; and snake poi- 
son retards the germination of seeds. A 
friend of mine was kept awake nearly all 
night by some strange noise at the window. 
A dead cuckoo told the story of an en- 
deavor to reach the supposed mate of the 
"cuckoo clock.' 9 I went once a long dis- 
tance to see a chickless hen which had 
driven the old cat away and was brooding 
over a lot of kittens, very watchful, very 
happy, and very proud. Mrs. Martin tells 
a similar story of a widower ostrich play- 
ing the role of a most excellent foster-moth- 
er to a half hundred tiny puff-balls of incu- 
bator chicks, guarding, watching, careful 
not to put his great feet on them, etc. A 
childless dog tried to steal some little pup- 
pies, but failing, took a toy dog made of 
rubber and tried to nurse it, licked and cod- 



MATERNAL LOVE 115 

died it tenderly for a long time. I have the 
photograph of a cat, deprived of her kit- 
tens, who is ecstaticly nursing the mother- 
less squirrels given her to eat. An Eng- 
lish physician describes the mother-zeal of 
a Maltese cat, a strict monogamist, faithful 
even in widowhood. But if any of the 
other cats had kittens she would manage 
to get some of them, and in a few hours 
she had an abundant supply of milk for 
them. The dependence of this milk-secre- 
tion upon pure mother-love began in this 
wise : At seven years of age she witnessed 
an accident to a little kitten just weaned, 
to which she had previously had a great 
aversion. This kitten fell, and hurting it- 
self, cried, piteously. At once dislike dis- 
appeared; "Zettie" ran to it, caressed it, 
and carried it upstairs. At this time she 
had been a widow for fourteen months, 
but she now began nursing the little or- 
phan and continued to do so for two 
months. I have elsewhere related an ex- 
actly similar fact, except that it was a little 
dog, long childless, or puppyless if you 
please, that nursed a lost kitten. Numer- 
ous instances are on record of men having 



n6 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

an ample milk- secretion and nursing babes. 
Wagtails use the backs of friendly stronger 
birds upon which they ride in long migra- 
tions. Elephants and men are the only 
animals that shed tears in weeping. Cows 
have been known to be so severely home- 
sick that to save their lives they had to be 
returned to their old home. Dogs have 
returned home over 800 miles of unknown 
country ; even when chloroformed it makes 
no difference in their return. A crow with 
clipped wings left his thieving new master 
and walked four miles through the snow 
to the old master. Dogs, monkeys, birds, 
and ducks have been known to die of a 
"broken heart/ ' from loss of young, loss 
of their masters, etc. Euskin tells the 
story of a race-horse that took sick and 
only got well when his pet kitten was tel- 
egraphed for and put in his stall. He then 
won the race! A mother monkey, the 
elder Kipling says, will carry with her for 
weeks the dried and dead body of her lit- 
tle one, fondling and petting it as if alive. 
It is said that if the male bird of Paradise 
is killed the female will continue to sit 
upon her eggs until she starves to death. 



MATERNAL LOVE 117 

I have said that sympathy with the whole 
world of living things is the prime requisite 
of learning truth. This is true whether 
the truth be scientific, philosophic, or re- 
ligious. It is especially so with children. 
The recognition of the maternal instinct 
in all other living things tells the young 
the nature of the world in which we live 
more than all the books and laboratories 
in the world. Take up the question of the 
growth and relative degrees of intelligence 
in animals. Guided by sympathy and a 
careful observation of facts we can show 
the child clearly on what biologic intelli- 
gence depends. Careful scrutiny shows 
that all vegetables and animals have an in- 
finite wealth of what may be called uncon- 
scious intelligence struggling for outlet. 
Every living thing, in its form, color, 
and function, is a palimpsest; behind the 
later bolder writing we see dimly the 
deeper, richer characters and messages of 
a more ancient truth. The intelligent 
energy that constitutes the essential being 
of all things is the same in all, but is pre- 
vented from coming to individual expres- 
sion by the peculiarities of organization 




n8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

and the necessities of life. The greater, 
the infinitely greater part of the intelli- 
gence <s>f our being, exists unconsciously, as 
cellular or physiologic intelligence. Out 
of this great mine of unconscious wisdom 
we quarry rich gems of our individual, 
willed, or conscious intelligence, and the 
progress of all personality as of all civili- 
zation consists in adopting the intelligence 
of the unconscious as that of our personal 
wills. The work of all true life and evolu- 
tion is to transform cellular or physio- 
logic wisdom and morality into conscious 
willed intelligence and morality. 

Look carefully at the plant-world. 
Plants are prevented from showing individ- 
ual intelligence by the fact that they have 
no powers of locomotion, and therefore do 
not need a centralized nervous system that 
is the agent of bringing cellular conscious- 
ness to personal consciousness. But they 
choose, they show emotions, likes and dis- 
likes, and they have evident joys and sor- 
rows. If you don't think so it is not the 
fault of the plant. It sees more without 
eyes than you do with them ! 

In the animal world the conditions per- 



MATERNAL LOVE 119 

mitting the development and showing of 
intelligence depend upon — 

1. The sensitiveness and amplitude of 
sensitive surface exposed to the external 
world. — This is a great and beautiful law, 
a key that unlocks thousands of mysteries 
for us. The interposition of hoofs be- 
tween the feet and the ground is the most 
noticeable illustration. The hard hoof 
prevents knowledge of the ground, and the 
perceptions are not sharpened. All hard- \J 

footed animals are, as a rule, less intelli- 
gent than soft-footed animals. The pos- 
session of other sharpened senses may 
help to compensate, however. The mobile 
lip of the horse helps him, and the knowl- 
edge of his own body gained by the sensi- 
tive tail also aids ; and also his association 
with man. The hog's nose and rooting 
propensities account for its relative intel- 
ligence over the sheep and other hard- 
footed brothers. The soft feet of birds are 
supplemented by the bill and the tongue, 
and especially by the wings. The mobile 
lips of the dog, his tongue, his expressive 
tail, together with his association with man 
have aided his soft sensitive feet to de- 



120 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

velop his intelligence greatly. The same 
may be said of the cat. But, it is the trunk 
of the elephant, one of the most remark- 
able physiologic structures in the world, 
that has made this wonderful animal the 
most intelligent of all, except the monkey, 
who has learned to use his front feet as 
hands, and thus (the prehensile tail and 
mode of life aiding), of all animals he has 
been put in the most intimate connection 
with the world. 

2. The second condition of expression of 
animal intelligence relates to the extent of 
the external world thus known. — The low- 
est degree, life in one element alone, will 
give very limited knowledge, as e. g. 9 of the 
earth alone, as in animals that live in the 
ground deprived of the light. But even 
here the contact of the whole body with 
the earth greatly enhances the possibilities 
of sensitiveness and recompenses the mole, 
for instance, for his little range of media. 
Fish are relatively stupid because of the 
single medium they know, but they have 
a large and sensitive surface in the fin and 
tail and mouth, to compensate. They have 
also good eyes. They have, however, no 



MATERNAL LOVE 121 

hearing as we know it, though they have 
a perception of vibrations and jars. 

The space, even in one medium, over 
which locomotion extends also conditions 
the intelligence. Wide-roaming, easily- 
moving animals are smarter than stay-at- 
homes. Locomotion calls for vision, and 
vision is the very sine qua non of conscious 
intelligence, or that under the control of 
the will. Some animals that move about 
freely when young, with eyes and other 
important organs, lose their eyes and 
senses when they attach themselves to one 
spot and become plant-like in habits. 

Those animals which know the air alone 
are also handicapped. But the bat has de- 
veloped such a sensitiveness of his interdi- 
gital membranes that he detects the relative 
density of the air near objects by this 
means alone, and is thus able, though blind 
or in the dark, to avoid objects perfectly. 

Most air-livers have soft, sensitive feet, 
as well as the wonderful wings, so that 
they know two media, the air, and such 
solid objects as trees, the ground, etc. The 
greater number of these media known, the 
greater the intelligence, other things being 



122 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

equal. So that amphibious birds, those 
also that swim as well as fly, are relatively 
nobler than those that fly alone. If they 
have good walking powers on land, this 
also helps. 

3. The development of intellect also de- 
pends on the relative development of the 
senses. — Fishes are put to a disadvantage 
by a lack of the senses of hearing and of 
smell. Snakes are also without the sense 
of hearing, but their long, lithe, soft bodies 
help them to know the ground, and by a 
peculiar structure of the ribs and scales 
each scale becomes almost a foot, so that 
getting a hundred little leverages on in- 
equalities, e. g. y of bark, some of them can 
crawl slowly up an almost perpendicular 
surface. Deer and dogs have an astound- 
ing development of the sense of smell which 
helps them greatly, as a hundred hunters' 
stories tell us. 

4. Length of life is also a noteworthy 
condition of mental development. The ele- 
phant with its hundred years of life, has 
a great advantage in learning and remem- 
bering experiences over his less long-living 



MATERNAL LOVE 123 

relatives. Things that live but for an hour 
or a day know but one instinct. 

5. Association with man is lastly a pow- 
erful helper of intelligence. Our domestic 
animals imitate and learn of us with avid- 
ity. Some dogs have learned to under- 
stand ordinary conversation. Chickens 
are slow in this respect, because their feet 
are hard, they have lost the power of fly- 
ing, etc. 

Thus, what an understanding of the 
world we get by sympathetic observation 
of life! Universal cellular intelligence is 
aided in becoming specifically manifest, or 
in becoming the instrument of the indi- 
vidual will, by the sensitiveness and ampli- 
tude of the bodily exposure to contact with 
the world thus sensed; by the relative de- 
velopment of other senses; by length of 
life ; and by association with man. 

6. But it is especially the strength and 
exercise of the maternal instinct, which 
besides governing the unconscious develop- 
ment, and being one of the most funda- 
mental of the conditions of intelligence, is 
specifically a powerful factor in the pro- 



124 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

duction of the intelligence of tlie genus and 
of the individual. One of the stupidest of 
animals, whose feet are hard, whose lips 
and tail are in this respect useless, the 
sheep, may be spurred to ingenuity by 
love, as by no other thing, A patient told 
me of a mother sheep which had no milk 
for her little one. It only needed one ex- 
perience to teach her when her lamb 
bleated with hunger, to run with the little 
one headlong to the house, a long distance 
away, where it was fed "by hand" by the 
kind-hearted human sisters. Tropical cats 
know all about artificial respiration. A 
friend saw a cat take its drowned kitten 
and roll it up a hill, the fore-paws alter- 
nately squeezing the lungs at every step; 
in about half an hour of almost frenzied 
labor the kitten was resuscitated. 

Literature is filled with the devices and 
marvelous proofs of ingenuity of animal 
parents in raising and defending their 
young. The feigning of death of opos- 
sums, snakes, and birds ; the simulation of 
wounds, the trailing of wings, the building 
of nest over nest by the summer yellow bird 
to prevent the incubation of the egg of the 



MATERNAL LOVE 125 

shameless cuckoo, the hiding of snakes 
under the mother's coils or down her 
throat, the thousand protective devices and 
ingenuities — all show how strong a force 
is maternal love in the development of the 
intelligence. Opossums leave the marsu- 
pial pouch early, and clinging to the 
mother learn many things of the world 
very early. Nicols tells a comical story of 
a young kaola which was taken by a cat 
to nurse with her own kittens. But the 
kaola had inherited the habit of riding 
about on its mother's back, a habit that 
the pussy foster-mother didn't like at all. 
But she was very patient about it all. A 
writer in Science, some time ago, tells of 
the curiosity of a monkey, which in hunt- 
ing other game on an opossum in his cage, 
discovered the wonderful pouch full of 
opossum babies, and examined them with 
tenderness but profound curiosity. Nicols 
tells of the laughable attempt of a little 
kangaroo to find the pouch of its dog fos- 
ter-mother. 

It is frightful to think of the evil that 
results from the dissociation and aliena- 
tion of humanity from animals, or, what is 



126 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

worse, from the nasty habit of considering 
them as soulless slaves to be used, or as 
targets to be shot at. When I see some 
savage human female riding about the 
streets behind horses whose necks are suf- 
fering from infernal check-reins, and 
whose eyes are rubbed sore by stupid blind- 
ers, driven by a fool who knows nothing of 
horse-character, I feel very much like wish- 
ing to pull that creature out of her cush- 
ions, cut off her hair, stick a bit in her 
mouth, and yank her head back in the same 
way as she has done with her horses. 
What else but having been brought up with 
animals and thus learning how lovable they 
are, will ever eradicate out of fiendish hu- 
mans the idea that when they have an hour 
or a day to spare from their work of plun- 
dering their fellow-men they must spend it 
in murdering some animal. " Let's go out 
and kill something ! ' ' That is sport ! And, 
of course, woman will never permit men 
to be worse than she can be, and so goes 
on the insane and awful destruction of our 
birds, of beautiful winged life all over the 
globe. Beware of a woman with a bird 
on her hat! 



MATERNAL LOVE 127 

What genuine and delightful happiness 
these little beings give us ! I shall always 
look back to the days when my dog and I 
played hide-and-seek in the woods for 
hours together, and I regret nothing more 
than the fact that I was unjust or harsh 
to him once or twice. Knowledge and sym- 
pathetic study of animals teaches one more 
and truer psychology than all the books can 
do, because in their artlessness they show 
the secret springs of motive, and of evolu- 
tion, and form a mirror wherein one may 
see himself reflected. 

Just one glimpse of the "one touch of 
nature which makes the whole world kin." 
Does this anecdote by Kipling Sr., not re- 
call the relations of some human couples 
we have known? 

' i One morning there came a monkey chieftain, 
weak and limping, having evidently been worsted 
in a severe fight with another of his own kind. 
One hand hung powerless, his face and eyes bore 
terrible traces of battle, and he hirpled slowly 
along with a pathetic air of suffering, support- 
ing himself on the shoulder of a female, a wife, 
the only member of his clan who had remained 
faithful to him after his defeat. We threw them 



128 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

bread and raisins, and the wounded warrior care- 
fully stowed the greater part away in his cheek- 
pouch. The faithful wife, seeing her oppor- 
tunity, sprang on him, holding fast his one sound 
hand, and opening his mouth she deftly scooped 
out the store of raisins; then she sat and ate 
them very calmly at a safe distance, while he 
mowed and chattered in impotent rage. He 
knew that without her help he could not reach 
home, and was fain to wait with what patience 
he might till the raisins were finished. It was a 
sad sight, but, like more sad sights, touched with 
the light of comedy. This was probably her first 
chance of disobedience or of self-assertion in her 
whole life, and I am afraid she thoroughly en- 
joyed it. Then she led him away, possibly to 
teach him more salutary lessons of this modern 
and ' advanced ' sort, so that at the last he would 
go to another life with a meek and chastened 
soui." 

We have seen that the absolute condi- 
tion of the existence of the human and 
animal world depends instantly and con- 
tinuously upon the secret of the fabrication 
and storing of food about her seed-chil- 
dren, by the Chemist-Mother of the plant- 
world. The existence of the living world 
depends then upon mother-love and upon 



A 



MATERNAL LOVE 1129 

mother-foresight for food, the primal con- 
dition of life-perpetuation. 

But not only for food, but for the feed- 
ing itself. The lambent flame of limpid 
love that burns in the startled wondrous 
mother-eye of cow, or dog, or human 
mother, as she gazes down upon her little 
nursling, is perhaps the most revelatory 
thing in the world. All the world loves a 
mother, and all mothers, human or animal, 
are sisters. A common passion links and 
unifies them all and makes them alike holy, 
all commissioned by another mother-heart 
to be sharers in a divine duty. Step into 
a pigeon loft. There is one bird which a 
few hours ago was liberated 250 miles out 
at sea. He was taken there in a closed 
basket. He knew nothing of compasses, of 
astronomy, or of steamers and oceans, but 
when the basket-cover was raised, by the 
guidance of an "instinct' ' the nature or 
mechanism of which we know utterly noth- 
ing, he darted toward home, toward the 
place of his duties as monogamous hus- 
band and as caretaker of the young. "With- 
out indecision or varying he came straight 
to his home over hundreds of miles of wa- 



130 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

ter, where no landmarks existed. At once 
he begins his domestic duty of driving and 
tormenting his wife toward the nest. The 
imperious fellow will brook no shilly-shal- 
lying. Eggs must be laid — Voila tout! 
When there are enough of them they must 
be hatched, which on occasion he will help 
to do, turning the eggs regularly, bringing 
the outside ones toward the center, etc., so 
that all the children shall be born together. 
When the young are there he has an abun- 
dance of "soft food" macerated, in his 
crop, a kind of bird-milk, ready to feed 
them until their digestive powers are ready 
for common food. The mother may now 
go about her business of getting ready for 
more eggs, and the mother-father attends 
to the babies, teaching them by and by 
where to go for food, etc, etc. Who taught 
the mother to stand over the already laid 
eggs instead of sitting on them, before the 
time of incubation of the whole lot should 
begin? Who formed each wondrous egg 
with such provisions that the "white' 9 or 
food of the young unhatched chick should 
surround the yolk, and again the yolk about 
the germinal vesicle, and about all the en- 



MATERNAL LOVE 131 

casing, protecting shell, with, pores or 
breathing spaces through it for the chick's 
supply of air? 

"The section of an egg proceeding from the 
outside to the center, shows, first, an outer layer 
of calcareous matter containing the coloring pig- 
ment, then the inner layer, both being penetrated 
by minute canals for the admission of air when 
the shell is dry. Next within lies the shell mem- 
brane, which is separated at the larger end of 
the egg into a double layer, and includes a small 
air-space, which increases in size as the egg 
grows stale and becomes unfit for incubation. 
Immediately in contact with the shell membrane 
is the albumen, a white viscous fluid, and again 
within that the vitellus, or yolk, containing the 
germ enclosed in its own membrane, and lighter 
than the albumen. The difference in specific 
gravity between the yolk and white is made, by 
a singular contrivance, to promote the develop- 
ment of the germ most effectually. From each 
side of the yolk in the direction of the long axis 
of the egg, proceeds a cord of condensed albu- 
men extending towards, but not meeting, the end 
of the egg, and vulgarly called 'the tread,' under 
the erroneous impression that it represents the 
influence of the male. Between those cords, — 
one passing toward the large and the other 
toward the small end of the egg — the yolk is, as 



i 3 2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

it were, slung in the albumen. Thus while the 
germinal vesicle on the outside of the yolk is 
prevented from coming into actual contact with 
the interior of the shell by its * moorings' in the 
denser substance of the albumen, the lightness 
of the yolk determines it to float toward the 
surface, and the cords allow it to go just so far 
as is sufficient to keep the germ spot always 
nearer the upper side of the egg, whichever way 
it may be turned on its axis. Consequently, that 
part of the yolk where the most vital part is 
situated remains, in all circumstances, nearest 
the source of heat, the mother's body." 

Let me also sketch for you the cares of 
another mother. This mother, though a 
vertebrate, has had to develop the hind 
legs and arches of the pelvic bones in 
such a way that the young must be born 
very early, so early indeed that there is 
no placental connection with the mother, no 
blood-feeding of the kangaroo baby before 
its birth. When born, indeed, it is merely 
an egg y without a shell, an inch long, a 
helpless bit of fragile protoplasm. Only a 
kangaroo mother could care for such a 
baby. This she does by sticking it in a 
wonderful pouch of skin beneath her body, 



MATERNAL LOVE 133 

and how this is done, and how the nipple 
is got into the mouth and clear down the 
throat into the stomach of the unformed, 
muscleless, motionless bundle, are mys- 
teries of kangaroo motherhood. What is 
still more wonderful is, however, under- 
stood. Without formed muscles there can 
be no suckling, but nature is, as always, 
equal to the emergency. The muscles are 
in the mother's breasts, and she can ex- 
trude the milk at will. Another bit of 
"special design " is required by the fact 
that as the kangaroo babies grow (the 
mother moving by jumps, as all know) 
their weight would burst the marsupial 
pouch if it were not braced and supported 
by the marsupial bone which grows out 
beneath it, and is thought to be ossified 
tendons of the external oblique muscles. 
The enormous brontosaurus has two such 
huge bones beneath the pelvic cavity. 

The pursuit of food for mate and little 
ones is, as we have seen, a more subtile 
but active cause of mental growth. The 
swifts in building their nests out of inspis- 
sated mucus from the large salivary glands, 
thus transform a weight of material much 



134 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

greater than that of their own body into 
this gelatinous substance. This drain on 
the system is so great that if the nest is 
stolen the second one is not, as was the 
first, white and pure, free from foreign 
substances, but is made up largely of feath- 
ers, hair, etc, Gould took from the lining 
of the nest of a long-tailed titmouse some 
2000 feathers. The body of the nest was 
made up of lichen, moss, hair, etc. The 
weight of the eggs of one sitting is 
much more than that of the mother's body, 
and this expenditure of energy in nest- 
building and egg-bearing is in all birds 
relatively enormous. Doubtless to feed 
the nurslings a bird ordinarily flies from 
300 to 500 miles a day — with how many 
wing-strokes to the mile? To illustrate 
the cooperation of the purely physiologic 
or unconscious processes of the body with 
the bird's willed or unconscious work, it 
may be noted that during incubation the 
temperature of the mother's body rises 
several degrees. God helps mothers ! In 
this connection also it may be noted that 
the hornbill feeds his wife and young ones 
(whom he has securely walled in their 



MATERNAL LOVE 135 

nest) through a little hole, with the pre- 
pared and regurgitated food, in a bag or 
pellicle, derived of course from the lining 
membrane of his own stomach. 

The genesial instinct is more plainly the 
origin of educational ingenuity in birds 
than in other animals. No two species of 
birds build nests exactly alike, and the 
mechanic and artistic ability in some is 
astonishing. That mother-love in birds 
begins and carries on the education and 
elevation of mentality there can be no 
doubt. It is certainly at the bottom of 
that astounding fact, bird-migration, a phe- 
nomenon of wonderful significance in the 
distribution of the flora, and even of the 
fauna of the whole world. 

But the same dominant desire also, I 
judge, governs the entire habits, distribu- 
tion, and character of all animals. To find 
a lair or place of safety for mother and 
young, and to secure food for those at 
home, must dictate the place of living, and 
thus, finally, the type morphologically and 
psychologically of every species of ani- 
mals. The ability to elude enemies by a 
thousand devices must form mental habits 



136 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

according to the peculiarities and the 
length of time of those habits. Volumes 
might be and have been written describing 
the myriad means of securing safety and 
food, and for starting the youngsters in 
life so that they shall be able to do the same 
thing again. Pigeons leave the nuts 
abundant in a thousand trees where they 
are raising their young, and fly hundreds 
of miles to get their food, so that when 
hatched the weak-winged youngsters shall 
have food in plenty where they are. To 
illustrate this fact let me describe one 
thing I have not seen in print, and which 
shows the instant and incessant govern- 
ment by the reproductive instinct : A pa- 
tient from Mexico tells me he has about 
1000 brood mares on his ranch. Each stal- 
lion defends and commands from 15 to 30 
mares, according to his fighting ability. 
He keeps his family always distinct from 
every other and this segregation is so 
rigid that when the whole thousand are 
"rounded up" and driven pell-mell into a 
corral, it takes the stallions perhaps hours 
of intense running, neighing, whinnying, 
fighting, and hunting, before each has his 



MATERNAL LOVE 137 

flock separated by winding but clearly-de- 
fined alley-like spaces between each group. 
Then the men may enter ! When running 
loose, if one group comes near another, one 
leader may try to drive or woo a mare of 
another family, at once resulting in a 
pitched battle between the two leaders. 
The fighting is done largely on the hind 
feet, the fore legs little used, the aim be- 
ing to seize the other's neck with the 
mouth. If one gets a good "hold" in this 
way the result of the battle and the pos- 
session of the object of battle is soon set- 
tled. The period of gestation of the horse 
is eleven months. My informant knows 
that it several times occurred in one family 
that colts born nine or ten months after 
a mare had been placed in the family were 
at once kicked to death by the jealously- 
wise head of the family, who had not been 
consulted in regard to the matter. 

A number of amphibious animals have 
the trick of living long beneath the water, 
and of keeping the submerged body en- 
tirely out of sight while exposing the tips 
of the nostrils to breathe. To find a home 
and security for his family the beaver has 



138 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

developed a marvelous degree of reason 
and architectural genius tliat has long been 
the admiration of man, and is superior 
to that of the bee. The platypus burrows 
in the bank of a stream, one tunnel enter- 
ing below the surface of the water, another 
above it, and both leading to the nest. 
Thus he can use either and escape all ob- 
servant enemies. 

It seems at present impossible to es- 
timate the due proportion of influence this 
necessity of nest-making, cave-homing, and 
lair-devising, all for the young, has had 
in developing ingenuity and mentality in 
animals, but I cannot doubt it has been the 
preponderating influence, direct and indi- 
rect, in spurring one species of animal into 
the human. Archeology and anthropology 
teem with hints and proofs of this fact. 
Home-making lies at the basis of all prog- 
ress out of animality into humanity, and 
of all advances out of savagery into civ- 
ilization. And is it not plain that the fam- 
ily relation is the direct product and ma- 
chinery of maternal love in its large sense? 
Every element of the most complex civili- 
zation springs from or is vitally related 



MATERNAL LOVE .139 

with the home-making industry. Mere 
food, until a high degree of civilization 
is reached, is perishable almost in an hour, 
and therefore is the object of the hour's 
need; but possession of one place of meet- 
ing, or of seclusion, begets the fact of own- 
ership. Tools, investments, houses, all 
things manufactured or durable, become 
possessions, and hence arises the concep- 
tion of property, and the entire legal as- 
pect of human relationship is thus seen 
to spring out of the family relation and 
flows inevitably from that relation. 

One of the most sympathetic and open- 
eyed observers of animal life, Hudson, says 
that most all wild animals have their 
games, dances, plays, or amusements, and 
especially all birds. What an influence 
love exercises in the formation of plumage, 
coloration, forms and habits, of all ani- 
mals is now known of all biologists, in- 
deed, of all intelligent people. Certain it 
is, therefore, that most all beauty in the 
animal world (and of course in the world 
of flowers it is wholly true) springs from 
some phase of maternal love. An oriental 
proverb says that "even the young of the 



140 ,THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

ass is beautif ul ! ' ' Childhood, either of 
plant, of animal, or of man, is the one su- 
perlative exhibition of beauty. A glimpse, 
a perfume, a flashing and gleaming of 
something superhumanly, supernaturally 
beautiful, lingers long and caressingly 
about all young things. The greatest pic- 
ture, the ever-painted model, the never- 
realized ideal of art-excellence, is the 
mother and her child. Whatever power 
for good or evil from Troy-times to pres- 
ent-times womanly beauty and charm has 
had in human life, — surely the whole of it 
can be credited or debited to but one thing. 
Art, whether in poesy, drama, novel, sculp- 
ture, or painting, is simply myriad-phased 
love. Back through all forms of life, clear 
to the protozoa, the beautiful is linked with 
the maternal in indissoluble unity. Es- 
theticism, art, all the charms and delights, 
are the rewards and benedictions of the di- 
vine Father and His pleasure in the re- 
newal of living forms. 

Now, exactly the same truth applies to 
morality, or the emotion of altruism! In 
all family life when the sexual or family 
relation is not in action, there is selfish- 



MATERNAL LOVE 141 

ness, utter indifference, or positive enmity 
always manifest. The principles of indi- 
viduation, the struggle for existence, the 
preservation of self, called the first law 
of life (but wrongly socalled), have un- 
limited and absolutely exclusive sway over 
all beings and functions, except when love 
and the care of the young come in to con- 
tradict and overrule them. Maternal love 
is the miracle of all biologic existence. It 
cannot be conceived as arising by any ac- 
tion of " environment " or from the neces- 
sities of the organism standing nakedly 
there. Into every life, nay, into every fi- 
ber, bone, and cell of every living thing, 
the great God, Love, stoops down and per- 
meates, nay, He clutches and masters each 
for a purpose beyond and after. From 
the standpoint of present-day science, from 
the standpoint of determinism, fate or 
chance, from the standpoint of the ag- 
nostic, or of his twin-brother, the atheist, 
this maternal-paternal love, this all-power- 
ful, all-forming, and all-transforming en- 
ergy is the most illogical, most uncaused, 
most utterly unaccountable thing conceiv- 
able. "We can explain all things else in 



142 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

some half -blundering, half-satisfactory 
way, but for this exotic wonder there is 
no scientific accounting that would not 
make a mummy laugh. It is, it comes to 
us from without, and that is all we can 
say. It is the one patent, convincing, un- 
answerable proof of the divine, or the su- 
pernatural, entering and grasping the or- 
ganic mechanism for ends beyond that 
organism itself. And its first, last, con- 
tinuous, and increasing effect is to make 
every organism value and cherish a being 
that is not self. It is therefore the very 
basis and essence of all that is ethical and 
religious. Every animal is put in training 
by it for humanization, and becomes 
through it a faultless illustration for us 
of the supernaturalism and the glory of 
ethics of other-love. To the childless a 
hundred animal stories teach that there 
are orphans we could make our own chil- 
dren. Alas! The heart-broken sadness, 
the pathos beyond tears of the motherless. 
Bead Kipling's Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, 
and then think of what is going on in 
the breasts of thousands of children in the 



MATERNAL LOVE 143 

" barrack-schools " of England, and in the 
orphan asylums of America. 

The limits within which the role of the 
maternal instinct is confined are more 
rigid in the animal world than in the hu- 
man. I doubt if anyone knows anything 
about the old bachelors and old maids 
there. Of course, there are but few such, 
but these few must occupy strange posi- 
tions in life. After the productive age has 
passed, one wonders if wild animals keep 
up the relics of family life. Probably not, 
I fear. At least, one species of birds, the 
cuckoos, are sharp little scoundrels. They 
build no nests, and carrying their eggs in 
their mouths, slip them into the nests of 
other birds, where they are hatched some 
days in advance of the eggs of the rightful 
owners. Then with characteristic inhu- 
manity, or unbirdity, they proceed to gob- 
ble up all the food and kick out of the nest 
the rightful children. Male birds often ar- 
rive in migration from their thousands of 
miles of flight before their mates, but the 
same mates do come, and they come year 
after year to the same locality and rebuild 



144 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

their nests in the same neighborhood or 
spot. This home-attachment has numerous 
illustrations. A water-wagtail once built 
her nest on the framework beneath a rail- 
way passenger car, which later was put into 
local service, running four times a day 
between Cosham and Havant, in England, 
in all about forty miles. At this time there 
were four young birds in the nest, and the 
little father, while his family were away, 
promenaded the turntable, etc., awaiting 
the shunting of the car bringing back his 
wife and babies. A pair of tomtits for 
three years built their nest in a letter box. 
All the letters posted fell upon the sitting 
bird, and the splendid postman carefully 
gathered the letters and left the birdies. 

Among animals the limits of the control 
of the maternal feeling are rigidly con- 
fined to simple necessity. Love seems to 
disappear as soon as the young can pos- 
sibly fly and get their food — another proof 
of its supernatural quality and origin. I 
have often wondered, too, at the general 
indifference of the father to the young. 
Jn many, perhaps most animals, the father 
seems to care no more for his children 



MATERNAL LOVE 145 

than if they were moving bushes. Cer- 
tainly, he cares no more for his own than 
for those of another, and the idea of any 
love toward grandchildren is absurd. Not 
even the mother shows this. 

But it is of the greatest interest to note 
that with the appearance of humanity and 
with its ideas of home and of property 
(both products of maternal love) there 
arises a natural extension of the scope and 
control of the family instinct, and the in- 
terest of the parents continues into or 
through adult life. Support and protec- 
tion of the mother continues beyond the 
child-bearing period, grandchildren are 
beloved (sometimes I have noticed, even 
more than the children themselves were), 
more distant relatives are held within the 
family affection, and the patriarchal type 
of society is established. When the higher 
ideals of society and civilization are per- 
mitted to arise, the egis of love is extended 
over the nation, and patriotism with its 
great influence in war and history appears. 
Finally, the highest development of hu- 
manity arises, and, still an actual out- 
growth and extension of maternal love, 



i 4 6 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

ethics and love of humanity, and of the 
divine Father-Mother of humanity, and of 
all life, takes possession of the loyal be- 
ing, whether he be social reformer, philos- 
opher, pietist, or religionist. 

I fear that I have wearied you: Let 
me then epitomize the principles about 
which I have gathered my much-wander- 
ing and perhaps incoherent thoughts : — 

1. Among the factors of evolution there 
is one of which scientists have made too 
little or no account. This comprises the 
entire grouping as one, of all the instincts 
variously denominated genesic, sexual, or 
reproductive, the whole series of the vari- 
ous functions, necessities, and results, go- 
ing to the begetting, gestation, nourish- 
ment, and training of the young. Con- 
ceived thus in its entirety we may, for 
want of a better name, denominate it ma- 
ternal love. 

2. In the vegetable this energy largely 
and entirely dictates the morphology and 
physiology of all types and species of 
plants, and is the sole factor in their flow- 
ering, seed-forming, and in the phenome- 
non of growth. 



MATERNAL LOVE 147 

3. The stored food, fashioned by the 
cunning and secret chemistry of the plant, 
and provided by maternal love for the first 
nourishment of its young in the seed, is 
the ultimate source of nourishment of the 
entire animal world, humanity, of course, 
included. 

4. In the animal world the maternal sen- 
timent more largely than any other or all 
other causes, leads directly or indirectly 
to the development of ingenuity, nest- 
building, and other forms of home-making, 
and hence to mental evolution and progress 
to higher types. 

5. It is doubtless in this special way 
the prepotent factor in the humanization 
of the one genus or species of animal from 
which we have sprung. 

6. In the human race it has been the 
dominant influence in the formation and 
progressive growth of society through its 
effects in the creation of property and pri- 
vate rights, and in the founding of homes, 
of families, etc. 

7. In both the animal and the human 
race it has been almost the sole source 
of the appreciation, ideals, and facts of 



148 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

esthetics, all forms of art drawing their 
inspiration and data primarily or at sec- 
ond hand from its exhibition and function. 

8. Eeligion and the belief in the super- 
natural apart, there is not, so far as we 
can see, any other cause that has been in 
the least operative in producing, through- 
out all biologic history, any ethical or 
altruistic fact or function whatsoever. To 
this great instinct is entirely due all the 
practices operative in plant or animal for 
the welfare of any other than self. And 
in the highest society of to-day every eth- 
ical act derives, directly or indirectly, from 
it. 

9. Almost all other evolutionary factors 
may be more or less satisfactorily ac- 
counted for on theories of "natural" 
causes, such as "natural selection," the 
persistence and correlation of energy, the 
"sensitiveness of protoplasm," etc., etc., 
but viewed in its singleness or in its en- 
tirety, this instinct, so far as our intelli- 
gence can judge, is plainly uncaused and 
inexplicable, and, to put it boldly, is a 
miracle, thrust among all other natural 



MATERNAL LOVE 149 

forces, and dominating all for its half- 
hidden, half -revealed purposes. 

May I relate a dream? 

I thought that maternal love and all per- 
taining thereto ceased appearing in our 
world because mankind did not appreciate 
the beautiful and gratuitous gift, and were 
so ungrateful, even abusive of it, that God 
grew tired thrusting it upon us. Men 
and women had grown so callous that they 
took upon themselves the awful duties of 
parenthood, and then neglected their chil- 
dren. They made orphans by thousands 
and then left them to be cared for in hor- 
rible asylums, their tender, unpracticed, 
unguided longings bruised, or like cellar- 
plants, left groping for hidden light. 
They ruthlessly killed and destroyed all 
things for selfishness and amusement. 

And so, in my dream, all that related 
to maternal love silently ceased to be, and 
I wandered among strange-seeming peo- 
ple and profoundly changed scenes. The 
whole animal world became other; orna- 
ment, color, gay feather and lightsome 



ISO THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

song gave place to sad makeshifts of utili- 
tarian hair, bristles, splotches, screeches, 
and grunts. Even in the eyes and faces 
of my best friends everything became dif- 
ferent, hopelessly pitying or inhumanly 
hard ; deep-seated selfishness gleamed upon 
one everywhere from snake-like eyes. 
Smiles one never met, but an occasional 
risus diaboli; cacchinations of derision or 
ridicule were heard, for men and all things 
were painfully grotesque and altered in 
appearance. Men jeered at each other be- 
cause all beards had disappeared; the 
glory of woman's hair had also gone. 
Worse than this, the beauty faded out of 
woman's form and feature, and instead 
of the divine charm of laughing eyes and 
radiant winsomeness, they all became half 
or wholly repulsive, coarse, much like men, 
and yet without the dignity or strength of 
men. The men had likewise become wom- 
anish without becoming in the least degree 
womanly. The beautiful, except perhaps 
the flash of the moon on wave or sun on 
mountain-top, had gone out of the world. 

No children were born, and those that 
existed were thrust out to die or live neg- 



MATERNAL LOVE 151 

lected, or were fed out of illogic pity. 
There was not a flower in the world. Al- 
most all human social gatherings ceased; 
why should people meet together now, 
when they had no pleasure in each other, 
and when each looked on the other thinking 
only how his money could be taken away 
from him? Men left their homes and were 
never heard of again, and in all places 
strangers, uncouth, ill-clothed, brutal, and 
cruel, came and went in objectless ebb and 
flow. Who had wealth turned it into gold 
or portable goods. All commercial credit 
ceased; banks closed their doors; every 
one barricaded his house, and went about 
" armed to the teeth.' ' The iron-mills and 
rolling-mills went on, and many manufac- 
tories, but everywhere was harshness, and 
grinl, and ugliness. Despair and idiocy, 
and crime and insanity instantly increased 
a hundred-fold. An awful shudder, a cos- 
mic horror crept like cold snakes through 
the arteries; the blood curdled in all 
hearts. Women whispered to men an aw- 
ful message, and men moaned it to each 
other ; hungry-eyed dogs divined it in their 
masters' eyes; it ran like doom along the 



i 5 2 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

branches of the leafless trees, down to the 
roots, and there every mole and insect was 
frozen with terror of it. God is dead! — 
were the agonizing words that palsied 
thought and emotion, and that clutched at 
the life-springs of every bosom. 

Slowly the prices of everything com- 
menced rising and famine began. It was 
found during the second year that the 
stock of grain was nearly or quite ex- 
hausted. Seed sowed in the ground came 
up, but there was no new seed formed. 
The cattle had died off in great numbers 
during the first and second winters because 
the owners kept the little corn that was 
left to still their own personal hunger. No 
calves or lambs were born, no chickens 
hatched, and the older animals could not 
get enough grass, leaves, or roots during 
the summer to carry them into the next 
winter, the third, when death would surely 
come. But they were not allowed to live 
that long; and during this second year 
every animal all over the world and of 
whatsoever kind that could be reached by 
the ingenuity of man's hunger had been 
sacrificed. Then began universal famine, 



MATERNAL LOVE 153 

cannibalism, and unutterable horror. Ev- 
erywhere was death, and death was every- 
where. Within two years from the death 
of love there was naught but death. Bocks 
and sand and waters there were, a desert- 
world just like that before the angel of 
maternal love came among the rocks and 
sands and waters, and made out of them 
the world we know, the world of grain and 
fruit, the world of sweet, cool grass, the 
world of rustling leaves, the world of beau- 
tiful, wonderful animal forms, the world 
of friends, the world of baby-faces, — the 
world of God! 



CHAPTER IV 

IMMORTALITY 

If you sit down in the quiet of your own 
room and calmly ask yourself what it is in 
reference to a life after death that you real- 
ly desire and what you may reasonably ex- 
pect, you will probably be surprised to 
find what a blank your mind is upon the 
subject. I doubt if you will find that you 
inwardly desire it, in the same manner, 
for example, that you desire wealth, or 
fame, or beauty. You have grown up in 
the belief that it is right to desire and be- 
lieve, but that, you know, is quite a differ- 
ent affair from actual yearning. 

Nearly every one puts the thought aside 
as beyond solution. One says, "My think- 
ing will not change the fact nor my long- 
ing bring it about. The duty of the pass- 
ing day is all I can fulfill." Under this 
cover of postponed examination the world 

154 



IMMORTALITY 155 

has grown as indifferent to the question 
as it was formerly engrossed by it. Fear 
of offending delicate sensibilities and es- 
tablished beliefs keeps the doubter and 
modifier silent; whilst the extreme of the 
omnivorous believer is set over against the 
out-and-out denier. But the great major- 
ity of people are neither believers nor dis- 
believers, but indifferentists — slowly sett- 
ling toward an agnostic non-committalism 
that is destructive of all intellectual and 
moral earnestness. 

It is my conviction that this abrogation 
of curiosity and examination is a most 
culpable and dangerous fact. If we live 
after death it is of tremendous importance ; 
if we do not it is of no less vital import, 
and the belief, the disbelief, or the evasion 
is of the most constant influence, uncon- 
sciously, subtly, upon every thought and 
act of every day's living. 

Suppose now we divest ourselves of the 
creeps and shudders usually accompany- 
ing a discussion of death and immortality, 
and fearlessly test the common dogma with 
a little analysis in the light of scientific 
research and reason. Let us suppose you 



156 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

are a believer: what is it you believe? 
You desire : what is it you desire, and how 
far is your desire feasible? You are con- 
vinced : but what is the truth? If possible, 
in what way and to what extent is a future 
life possible? If attainable, by whom or 
by what means? Moreover, the kind of 
belief makes all the difference in the world. 
I have read somewhere about an African 
chief who killed his wife's lover, and was 
defeated at last by his wife's unswerving 
belief in immortality, she committing sui- 
cide in order to join her lover. But the 
chief was equal to the emergency and he 
in turn killed himself in order to follow the 
pair and break up their tete-a-tetes in the 
other world! It all depends upon what 
you propose doing with a future life 
after you get it. You might just as 
well be digging clams on this earth as 
"singing Hosannas around the throne" in 
heaven. 

Do you believe in or fervently desire 
what, with splendid bravery and abandon 
the old creed called "the resurrection of 
the body ' ' ? Terrible counter-queries 
arise. At what age in your life would you 



IMMORTALITY 157 

choose as best representing the ideal body 
for your resurrection? Would you prefer 
your body as it was when you were a child, 
when youthful, when mature, or when old? 
Moreover, it is changing every minute, this 
body. It is estimated that something like 
five million blood-corpuscles die every sec- 
ond of your life. Even the two or three 
pounds of minerals in one's bones are only 
a little more permanently fixed. All com- 
ponent parts are undergoing change every 
instant: they soon become grass, grain, or 
tree, passing again into others' bodies, and 
so on forever. Is it the form and feature 
you desire to preserve and not the con- 
stituent particles? But form and feature 
change every day or year, and are as im- 
possible to fix as the atoms themselves. 
Indeed, is not the whole matter put beyond 
choice by the evident fact that unless by 
the fiat of an extramundane deity the only 
moment possible to fix the bodily form in 
the mould of eternity would be the death- 
moment? And yet this were the most un- 
desirable of all seasons, since at that hour 
the body is in the weakest, most useless, 
and most wretched condition of all the 



* 5 8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

hours it has served us. Supposing there- 
fore, that you are so in love with your own 
body that you would wish to call it into life 
again and for forever, we see at once that 
no moment or phase of development could 
be chosen, except perhaps the dying mo- 
ment, the least desirable of all, and that 
the particles of one's body have served 
their turn in myriad other bodies each hav- 
ing an equally valid claim to his "proper- 
ty." Besides this the absurdity of the 
whole is emphasized by the crushing fact 
that all the organic matter of the world has 
been used over and over for bodies and 
the earth has not enough hydrocarbons to 
fit out again with bodies a small fraction 
of the souls that have lived upon it. 
Doubtless the combined weight of all the 
organic bodies that have lived on the earth 
would be many times the total weight of 
the globe including its minerals, elements, 
and gases. It may be frankly admitted 
that no bodily resurrection is possible. 

And it is as certainly undesirable. The 
old dogma was the crudest materialism, 
wholly unworthy of the credence of those 
who pretended to believe that God is a 



IMMORTALITY 159 

spirit, and that they are his children. 
The belief in bodily resurrection was a 
natural concomitant of the age of sensual- 
ism before the mind and spirit had risen 
to their modern heritage. The desire for 
such a resurrection stamps the person with 
a self-confessed imperfection of mental 
and moral development. The impossibil- 
ity of such a resurrection is one of many 
proofs that life is no sensualist at heart 
and that ideality is the final outcome, the 
trend of actuality. Nature compels us to 
take wings though the sluggish Psyche lin- 
gers lovingly in the pretty little cocoon 
of materiality she has built about herself. 
Is it perhaps your understanding, reason, 
or intellect that you desire to perpetuate 
forever? Frankly, now, are you so in love 
with your mental outfit? In your more 
modest and sane hours are you not sadly 
conscious how very imperfect it is ? While 
we are young and very conceited we may be 
filled with self-satisfaction and trust in our 
own judgment, but as the years drag by, 
we, looking back over the past, grow more 
and more conscious that our intellect is 
not to be trusted. Think of the intermin- 



160 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

able series of blunders of which your life 
is the record ! How poorly you have mis- 
judged people and circumstances! How 
your reason has fooled you many times and 
again ! How many illusions and delusions 
you have lived through! With what sad 
clearness you now see your former stupid- 
ities, and with what blindness you fail to 
see your present ones! Looking about 
you, you find others equally as gifted as 
yourself holding your opinions as loath- 
some. Looking above you, you see the 
most intellectual and the most educated 
diametrically opposed in their opinions of 
God, man, and nature. Two great men, 
two brothers learned and trained in dia- 
lectic and logic, soon grow apart. One be- 
comes a cardinal of the Eomish church, 
accepting papal infallibility and a thou- 
sand such absurdities, the other as firmly 
convinced that the fallacies of the English 
church are God's gospel. Looking below 
you, you see the great mass of men wreck- 
ing their minds and lives upon a thousand 
outrageous beliefs and prejudices. There 
is no sadder spectacle in the world than 
this that the people love error. But each 



IMMORTALITY 161 

one with imperturbable conceit is con- 
vinced that he sees better and plainer than 
another. Every partisan democrat or re- 
publican has no sort of doubt that he is 
right about every financial or govern- 
mental measure, though he has never stud- 
ied finance, history, or political economy 
five minutes. He does not dream that he 
is a dupe of low-lived politicians and of 
his own lack of intellect. All history is a 
tangle of such poverty-stricken intellec- 
tion. One can but be amazed at the prone- 
ness of everybody to see things and do 
things every way but the right way. And 
this is the kind of a mental equipment you 
would stamp with the seal of eternity ! 

Possibly you may protest that it is a 
more perfect and purified intellect that you 
wish. Ah, yes, but that would not be your 
intellect. You want to be made over, made 
in another person. That would not be 
your immortality but that of another. 
That would imply that it is pure intellect 
and perfect, in the abstract, that you are 
interested in. Have you shown much in- 
terest in that sort of intellect in the past? 
If you wish such an immortality of a per- 



162 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

fected intellect you must certainly possess 
it before it can be made everlasting. 

Perhaps, again, you will say that it is 
the ever-progressive ever-growing intellect 
you desire. This is subterfuge. That is 
not what you wish but what you would 
take in default of your first choice. Les- 
sing said that if God held out to him abso- 
lute truth in one hand and in the other the 
everlasting search for truth he would 
choose the latter. But the condition of 
everlasting search would be the condition 
of everlasting imperfection of intellect. 
Lessing's choice seems to me impious. 

I therefore conclude, that at heart you 
do not wish to eternalize your crude im- 
perfect intellect, and that the sole method 
of getting an exalted and perfected intel- 
lect is to cultivate it here and now. Have 
you in the past obeyed reason and not pas- 
sion or self-interest? Have you studied 
logic, history, and science with a sincere 
desire to do your political and social duty, 
and to free yourself from prejudice, error, 
superstition, and conceit? If not why 
should God suddenly endow you with a 
perfect intellect ready-made? Is it God's 



IMMORTALITY 163 

way in this world, to give excellencies un- 
asked and unearned? Eest assured he will 
not do it at your dying hour. It is no 
particular merit in you to die ; why should 
you be rewarded with a new intellect then ? 
Or, again, you may say that it is not so 
much your intellect that you wish to make 
immortal as it is your emotional nature, 
affection, etc. Love and friendship, you 
complain, are cut off by death and the ten- 
drils of the heart die because they find 
nothing to cling to or rest upon. You 
would like to renew beyond the grave the 
love and sympathy that has made the 
earth-life endurable, and even beautiful. 
Now is this, in very truth, just so? Are 
you really satisfied with your devotion and 
love? Have not your outgoings of the 
heart been quite fickle, illogical, selfish, and 
calculating? Has not your love and grati- 
tude been often a lively sense of benefits 
to come? Has your love to woman not 
been of the "Kreutzer-Sonata" type, a 
little better and more subtly-concealed 
perhaps, but at heart the same? If you 
are a woman have you been seeking to get 
or to give love, and has your little affection 



164 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

been but payment for protection and a 
home? Have you chosen true and noble 
friends and been true and noble to them? 
Has your charity been but alms-giving 
without kind sympathy and helpfulness? 
Have you as married folk, perhaps, been, 
as the cant phrase has it, "devoted to each 
other,' ' but oblivious of the duty of affec- 
tion toward the rest of the world, — grin- 
ning examples of I 'egoisme a deux? Is your 
family a fetich, an enlarged sort of selfish- 
ness ? Do you at heart care much for any- 
body except your own precious self? And 
a too exclusive love, even of the purest 
type, may be sin in God's eyes. If you 
bind all your affection upon one weak life 
you risk a precious value upon too single 
and narrow an object, and deprive others 
of the sympathy that need it more. "Just 
wrapt up in one," as the sentimental 
jargon has it, is often if not always a 
pleasant way of great sin. Affection may 
become morbid — a disease, quite as well 
as any abuse or exaggeration of any other 
characteristic. 

I take it that they who are the most 
satisfied with the strength, purity, and 



IMMORTALITY 165 

constancy of their love and emotional na- 
ture are precisely they that have neither 
actual strength, purity, and constancy of 
sentiment, and are thus accurately they 
that should not have immortality. 

Lastly, if neither body, intellect, nor the 
affectional nature are such as you wish 
made eternal, are you any better contented 
with your moral nature ? The question at 
once raises a smile. The feeling of our 
own ethical unworthiness has crystallised 
into the great Christian dogma of Christ 's 
vicarious sacrifice. In the words of the 
old hymn, " Jesus died and paid it all, all 
the debt I owe." No man hoped to get to 
heaven on his own merits. Much of the 
zeal of religion has consisted in the joy of 
the belief that by a sleight-of-hand trick, 
a big sponge of forgiveness was wiped over 
the ethical debit and credit account by the 
lachrymose deity, whose occupation, as 
Heine said, was to forgive. History is one 
long monotonous list of man's sins and 
inhumanities. I think it probable that you 
will not urge the ethical aspect; I would 
leave that plea aside. We all know that 
we are very much like a lot of pigs, each 



166 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

after the most and best corn and the warm- 
est bed. The amazing immorality of try- 
ing to get to heaven on another's merits 
was the most brazen example of how little 
heavenliness there was in the heaven- 
hunters and heaven-sealers. Of course 
the desire for heaven itself, the desire for 
one's happiness was immoral when condi- 
tioned upon the misery of others. Nature 
in this respect is better than man, denying 
him his childish materialistic desires and 
forcing him to wait for immortality until 
he can learn to live in the spirit and seek 
no selfish heaven. 

Just as the body is ever changing, and 
it is impossible to seize upon any hour 
when we could eternalize it, except at the 
undesirable death-hour, so it is the same 
in reference to intellect, love, and morality. 
There are no two days in life when we are 
the same. As to intellect we have little 
before adult life is reached, and most peo- 
ple have little after fifty or sixty years. 
It is proverbial that few change their opin- 
ions after that age, but subsist on old 
prejudices and ideas. The mental powers 
get into ruts and habits, true reason being 



IMMORTALITY 167 

abrogated. As to love we laugh at our 
fickleness, and our habits and ideals of 
friendship get sordid as each year strips 
off the freedom and expansiveness of youth 
and the dear cold ghost of self is more 
exclusively worshipped. And our ethical 
standards change with each day's passing. 
We have at every hour to clutch ourselves 
by the throat and cry, "Stay! Who art 
thou?" And lo ! while we ask our protean 
self the question, we have become another. 
We seek perpetuity of existence for some- 
thing ever becoming other. We seek per- 
sonal identity after death, but we have no 
personal identity before death: how then 
can we have it afterward? Do you not 
see that what makes you recognizable, dif- 
ferent from other individuals, and what 
would make personal immortality possible 
depends upon the accidents of organiza- 
tion, — depends firstly upon the bodily pe- 
culiarity, and secondly upon imperfections 
of mind that you do not wish to perpetu- 
ate ? Twins sometimes wear a knot of rib- 
bon as a signal whereby their friends may 
recognize them. Our faces and bodies are 
but such little symbols or signals that our 



168 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

souls have hung out for the day. Divest 
your best friend of his body and would you 
recognize him? Have you ever thought 
how the photograph of your friend's soul 
would look? If bodily form and imperfec- 
tions make up the most of what we call 
individuality it becomes evident that in 
casting off imperfection we become less 
narrow, less individual. As you become 
freed from the cramping littleness of self- 
love and the bonds of self -gratification, as 
you rise into the life of the spirit, you find 
yourself less individual. One fitted for a 
true heaven would not care for the old 
immortality. What is good to carry over 
into the future life is not so much personal 
identity as personal non-identity, not so 
much the imperfections that make us indi- 
viduals as the perfections that free us from 
individualism. We must lose our life to 
find it. We have overestimated the value 
of individuality. Self-consciousness has 
become hypertrophied, and the summum 
honum of life is held to be the preservation 
of a little puckered-up individuality. 
This over-development of individualism is 
doubtless due to the fierce struggle man 



IMMORTALITY 169 

has had to elevate himself out of savagery. 
It has been possible only through excessive 
carefulness and love of the ego. The 
struggle for existence is now taking on 
class and corporate characteristics so that 
the common weal is an ideal quite as much 
as individual satisfaction and safety. 
Hence the exaggeration of personality may 
now return to something like a healthy 
normalism. As a natural outgrowth and 
consequence of this over-development of 
the individual consciousness, there came 
the absurd attempt to carry over into the 
after-life the same sort of existence that 
had been developed here, — consisting in a 
neglect of the actual world of one's de- 
scendants, an ignoring of death that ends 
the body and products of organization, and 
a failure to see that a future life after 
death must be a life of the spirit, of per- 
fections, and of the common life, not of 
peculiarities and imperfections. If this 
seems an aery height and a too rare air 
it argues against your preparation for the 
only desirable as well as the only possible 
kind of immortality. It argues against 
you just in the same way that your horror 



170 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

of death does. It is only participation in 
the divine life of the spirit that can see 
death as right and good. Death comes to 
shatter our baseless trust in the evanescent 
physical and teach us dependence upon the 
everlasting spiritual. They dread death 
whose life is of the physical type. God 
never gave to man a greater blessing, after 
life itself, than death, and nothing more 
strikingly proves the divine government of 
the world than the certainty of its coming 
to us all. If death is your enemy, life is 
not your friend. The brutal attempt to 
ignore the fact, the belief that the body 
with its pack of heathenish appetites and 
needs could push through death and come 
out fresh and renewed on the other side 
is the very insanity of individualism 
and the intoxication of materialism. The 
mourning, shudder, gloom, and horror of 
death, — God-sent if anything is — is prac- 
tical pessimism and reckless atheism. 
Death's one lesson is that we must love 
and cultivate what he cannot touch. One 
who has lived a life of kindness and spir- 
ituality has no horror of death, and to him 
it has little mystery. But to him whose 



IMMORTALITY 171 

divinity has been self and whose religion 
the worship of his physiological senses, 
death must be the ugliest of enemies who 
is to rob him of his all. Did you ever 
notice how life is plastic and free when 
first fashioning for itself a body? "All 
heaven lies about us in our infancy.' ' In 
youth we are unselfish, aspiring, and noble. 
As the years go by the power of the organ- 
isation, the material, grows, and limits 
more and more the freedom of the spirit. 
Frankenstein turns upon its maker. With 
age men get narrow, cold, calculating; 
women snakey, scheming, cruel. The soul 
finds itself more and more the slave in- 
stead of the master, and by and by when 
the slavery becomes unendurable, it takes 
flight, and this you call death. It is the 
body's reward for insubordination. I 
think we deserve little sympathy for dying. 
Most of us have well-merited death before 
it comes — I speak, of course, only of the 
death of those in life's afternoon. Few 
keep the young life pliant and free beyond 
the age of fifty. If people could see that 
life is the maker and molder of organiza- 
tion, and if they would seek immortality 



172 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

upon earth, I believe men might come to 
live a hundred years. Trees learn to live 
thousands of years, but they keep youth, 
and spring, and trust, and love, forever 
nestling with the birds among the rejuv- 
enescent leaves of spring. We die not be- 
cause the body is weak, but because it has 
become too strong. We die because there 
is no real continuance and strength in any- 
thing but the non-physical, and we have 
trusted in the physical. Matter without 
free life is inert, moved only from without : 
the dead body is simply matter without 
life. It is not the blacksmith's arm that 
is strong; without nerve-force it cannot 
raise an ounce, cannot raise itself. 
Whence the nerve-force? From the gan- 
glionic gray cells of the spinal cord and 
brain. And whence these little gray cells? 
The dear stupid physiologist has now 
reached his limit, and you can confidently 
answer for him that it was Life that cre- 
ated these things, Life that existed before 
muscles, nerves, and cells, and that slowly 
fashioned them; Life, an order of exist- 
ence in no imaginable way analogous to, 



IMMORTALITY 173 

or to be confounded with matter or mech- 
anics. There is in the history of thought 
no more ludicrous and dismal failure than 
the attempt to explain life in terms of 
mechanics. The hope of the materialist 
that science would prove his prejudice is 
torn to tatters. The children of the spirit 
are amazed at the bat-blind inability to 
see the fact, — to see that life is more cer- 
tain and enduring than matter, soul than 
sense. The organs of the body are 
changed, diseased, die ; the body itself dies ; 
generations of bodies die, but like a re- 
taining cord of silk, on which all the glit- 
tering beads of flesh are strung, there is 
the soul, the life, ever the same, persisting 
unchanged through all change, giving unity 
to diversity, molding, making, discarding, 
choosing, healing, working to far-away 
ends with blind, and dead, and obstinate 
materials. You love the flesh over-much 
and jealous life says to you, "Take it, 
then, this so loved and wondrous flesh ; me 
you have not loved,' 9 — and lo! the dead 
body, useless, decaying, lies before you. 
Let no materialistic misreading of science 



174 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

hoodwink you into any blurring of the out- 
lines between matter and life. 1 The two 
are as far apart as heaven and earth, are 
as dissimilar as thought can conceive, — 
perhaps in a final analysis, are the only 
two things of the universe. There is no 
fact of science showing the faintest war- 
rant for confounding the two. Even Hux- 
ley calls materialism the most baseless of 
all dogmas. It will probably be found that 
there is but one element of which all others 
are duplications and combinations, atoms 
being but centers of force. But life is 
irresolvable into any form of matter or 
mechanical energy. It is not only unthink- 
able that matter could originate life, but 
it is demonstrably absurd. No scientist 
to-day believes in spontaneous generation. 
Ornne vivum, etc., is an axiom. The plant 
has no nervous system and yet has every 
physiological function possessed by the hu- 
man body. It has contractility, irritabil- 
ity, respiration, anabolism, katabolism, and 

i Those who think this view is the voice of faith 
and not of true science may profitably read a little book 
that has come to my notice since writing these pages: 
Life Theories and Religious Thought, by Lionel S» 
IBeale. 



IMMORTALITY 175 

reproductivity, — that is, it has spontane- 
ous movement, it responds to stimulation, 
it breathes, it assimilates, it excretes, it 
begets its like, — and physiologically this 
is all you can do. Nay, more than this, 
even a drop of the jelly-like protoplasm 
that makes up the basis of all cell-struc- 
tures, animal or vegetable, has also all of 
these qualities or powers. 1 There are 
bundles of wholly structureless, unorgan- 
ized jelly that exhibit these capacities in 
a wonderful degree. There is, for in- 
stance, Hydra viridis, that has no eyes and 
yet sees, no brain or nerves and yet lies in 
wait for prey, pursues and fights, or flees 
from danger. Turned inside out it lives 

1 According to the latest scientific researches the de- 
pendence of all organization upon life is more clearly 
shown than ever. My friend Dr. Edmund Montgom- 
ery twenty-five years ago, as a result of extended ex- 
periment and research, showed that the body of ani- 
mals is not an aggregation of cells, the force of the 
whole being derived from the enslaving and utiliz- 
ing these subordinate organisms, but that the whole 
body is a single protoplasmic living connected mass or 
unit with functionally specialized parts. That this 
view is the scientific view of to-day and that the cell- 
aggregate theory is dead may be seen by consulting the 
article "Zelle," by Prof. Frommen in Eulenburg's Real- 
Encyclopddie der gesammten Heilkunde, 1890. 



176 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

and digests its food as well as before. It 
holds live worms down with an improvised 
arm when they try to get out of its stom- 
ach. Any part reproduces all. Cut off 
the bottom of its stomach and it goes on 
eating, quite untroubled by the little acci- 
dent, — and so on. A great, wise, blind 
man has defined evolution, or life, as the 
integration of matter and the dissipation 
of motion during which the matter passes 
from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity 
to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and 
during which the motion undergoes a par- 
allel transformation. Some one else im- 
proved upon this by saying that it was "a 
change from a no-howish, untalkaboutable 
all-alikeness, to a some-howish and in gen- 
eral talkaboutable not-all-alikeness, by con- 
tinuous something-elsifications and all- 
togetherations." Schelling said that life 
was the tendency to individuation. But 
the crystal or the planet shows that, and 
they are not living. As the hand cannot 
grasp itself, neither can life define itself. 
All definitions I have seen miss the essen- 
tial and primal characteristics of spontan- 
eous movement. But all definitions begin 



IMMORTALITY 177 

by begging the question — assuming the 
thing explained. The truth is that there is 
no definition or explanation possible. The 
dualism of matter and life must be ac- 
cepted. There is no monism can bridge 
the gulf between mechanics and life. In- 
organic matter with its inherent forces and 
laws cannot be conceived as ever coming 
into or as passing out of existence. From 
all eternity it was as it is, and so it will 
remain. The physical universe shows no 
hint of design, no glimpse of freedom, no 
trace of intelligence, no suggestion of a 
maker or God. It has no power of choice, 
no spontaneous motion. But the merest 
speck of living matter is utterly and abso- 
lutely different. It may have eyes or no 
eyes, and yet it sees, ears or not and yet 
it hears, nerves or not and yet it feels and 
reacts, brain or not and yet it thinks and 
plans, and acts in accordance with intel- 
lectual resolves. The dead body of your 
child is most inconceivably different from 
the living body of an hour ago. 

The one fundamental mystery of the ex- 
plainable world is why life seeks objectifi- 
cation in material forms, and why it seeks 



i;8 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

it with such vehemence and ardor. Life 
seems to bite at matter as if with fam- 
ishing hunger. One wonders if from some 
other planet life is being suddenly starved 
out or banished by some catastrophe, and 
as a consequence there is thence an over- 
emigration of the hungry Huns upon 
our earth. Certain confused and con- 
fusion-breeding philosophers in the in- 
terests of a theoretical monism or panthe- 
ism pretend to find or to believe that the 
rorganic is born out of the inorganic, 
that the physical world shows evidence of 
design, that life and mentality were im- 
plicate and latent in preexistent mat- 
ter. Yet they will accept the evidence 
against spontaneous generation derived 
from the fact that if you kill all organic 
life by intense heat and then exclude 
life from without you will never find 
life to arise. But it is plain that in the 
condensation of the dust of space into suns 
and planets all organic life was killed in 
the hottest of all conceivable heat. But 
as the planets cool, life appears. It must 
have come from without, and must there- 
fore be a universal self-existent power. 



IMMORTALITY 179 

Why, or how, or whence life comes to us 
we do not know now, but the transcendent 
miracle is ever before our eyes: infinitely 
rich and free ; life is filling, thrilling, sur- 
charging every molecule of matter to which 
with wondrous power and ingenuity it can 
gain access. It covers every thousandth 
of an inch of the earth's surface, dives into 
the deepest ocean depths, fills the air as 
high as the mountain tops, ever unsatisfied, 
ever grasping up a million million renais- 
sant forms, never resting, never baffled. 
Before this omnipresent god one stands in 
rapt amazement and worship. To matter, 
then, life first brought, and still ever brings 
the power of organization, of adaptation, 
of spontaneous energy, and of movement. 
But when the death of the organization 
takes place, the life that preceded and 
formed it is not lessened or affected. 
When the watch wears out does it 
prove that the watchmaker is dead? It is 
more rational to suppose that the watch- 
maker has kept on with his work, that he 
has made and will make many more 
watches, and I therefore judge that the 
life of each of us, that existed before our 



180 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

bodies, that formed our bodies, will still 
form other bodies after ours. The Ori- 
ental doctrine of the transmigration of 
souls is not to be accepted in its crude 
details, but it is doubtless a great truth. 
It is more rational and more consonant 
with what we know of life, than the theory 
of wasted life implicate in the barbaric 
notion of sending numberless millions of 
souls to hell to do nothing but suffer use- 
less pain, and other millions to heaven to 
suffer (I use the word advisedly) useless 
pleasure. Any theory of immortality that 
rests upon the assumption of uselessness 
and waste may be quickly set aside. Just 
as matter and force are indestructible, 
various forms of force being interchange- 
able, so it must be with life. There must 
be a conservation of life-energy just as 
rigid, and this truth must remake and re- 
mold the whole conception of immortality. 
When a mechanical force disappears in one 
phase, it at once reappears in another 
aspect. Thus vegetable animal and mental 
life are but different aspects of life-force, 
and suffer no loss when transformed one 
into the other, or when the body disappears 



IMMORTALITY 181 

altogether. And as it is the inherent na- 
ture of force never to rest so there is no 
rest for life. Banishment of life to a 
heaven of inaction is as impossible as it is 
absurd. 

This extension of the law of the con- 
servation of force to things biologic and 
psychic is a two-edged sword: it offers 
conclusive evidence of the fallacy of the 
materialist and unbeliever. There is no 
annihilation; your life at death not only 
may not stop but cannot stop. Life is as 
inextinguishable as physical force. On the 
other hand this sword deals the death blow 
to two equally shallow fallacies of believ- 
ers. Just so sure as it insures the preser- 
vation of your life, of all that is worth 
preservation, just so sure it denies the 
possibility of preserving what was bound 
up with and produced by organization, — 
that is, individuality and personal identity. 
These things, if not entirely, are certainly 
largely the products of your peculiar 
physical and physiological organization. 
Whatever is born of the flesh must perish 
with the flesh; what is born of the spirit 
shall inherit eternal life. But the pro- 



182 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

foundest and most distinguishing rebuke is 
given the unscientific, puerile, selfish as- 
sumption of the waste, loss, and useless- 
ness of life involved in the old theory of 
heaven and hell. "When from a chemical 
compound you take away and liberate one 
element or compound radicle, does it then 
shoot off into space to " flock all by itself" 
for eternity? By no means! It at once 
rushes into a new combination with its 
nearest neighbor, quickly picking up again 
the round of its duty and function. The 
curious notion that after having done work 
in one body, life or souls should at once 
rush off to some far-away star, there to 
sing or howl for eternity was a childish ab- 
surdity. One wonders where even an 
omnipotent God could get material for such 
an amazing manufacture and loss of souls. 
The theory also forgot that logic demands 
that what should live forever in the future 
must perforce have lived forever in the 
past. A rope, if it have one end, must 
have two ends. What, therefore, have our 
souls been doing during this past eternity? 
The truth is that absolutely speaking there 
cannot be souls, but only soul. Life 



IMMORTALITY 183 

is a unit, and indivisible. The tiniest bit 
of bioplasm holds and represents all of 
life. Neither yon nor it are separable 
from the whole. There may be education 
and progressive evolution of life as a 
whole, but there can be no individual and 
selfish salvation apart from the salvation 
of all other souls. The idea that release 
from the body at once releases a soul from 
action, duty, and the work of life, is an 
illogicality that could have arisen in no 
mind conversant with the demonstrated 
law of the non-wastage of force in any 
work of energy elsewhere. Life is never 
tired; it is the body that requires rest not 
the spirit. The old doctrine of heaven, an 
eternity of laziness, was the sigh of the 
sluggish flesh whipped to ceaseless work 
by the unresting life. The desire of 
heaven was the desire of eternal death. 

This extension of the idea of non- wast- 
age, the rigid conservation and intercon- 
vertibility of force, to things of life, gains 
a new significance and grandeur when we 
consider that whatever proves the immor- 
tality of man proves the immortality of 
every other animal or vegetable form. 



184 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

The tree and horse have a soul quite as 
well as you, and must live after death 
quite as surely as you will. It is the flim- 
siest of conceits that makes men think they 
are endowed with a special sort of soul or 
divine life, different from that of animals 
or plants. Don't flatter yourself. God 
takes quite the same loving pains and care 
in the elimination of a leaf that he does of 
a brain-cell. Man is but a small part of 
the animal world, and the whole animal 
world is but a small part of the total life 
of the globe. Don't despise the vegetable 
kingdom: it can do something you cannot 
do — make living matter out of mineral 
substances. You could not live a day with- 
out the food furnished you by "your 
brothers, the plants." Hence if human 
life or souls cannot be sent off into space 
to do nothing, neither can the souls of ani- 
mals and plants. If we are to have our 
heaven they must have theirs also. Does 
not this tangential theory begin to be 
clumsy and work with huge creakings and 
difficulties? It looks like reductio ad ab- 
surdum. 

Not only is the tangential theory contra- 



IMMORTALITY 185 

dictory of all physical analogies and all 
known laws, but it is positively immoral. 
It is but a refined selfishness. Worldliness 
is none the less sinful because it is other- 
worldliness. If billions of souls could thus 
be wasted in an eternity of useless pain 
or pleasure, could thus, drunken with in- 
dividuation, hug their own sweet ghosts 
for never-ending time — then were life a 
farce, the universe a huge meaningless ma- 
chine for grinding out waste and useless 
souls. But if all life, past or future, is 
one and indivisible, purposive, educational, 
then the world becomes full of meaning 
and the face of the Father, Life, smiles 
out at us from every living thing. The 
faith of all good men that goodness is at 
the heart of things is justified. The Earth 
becomes our home, that we can love; our 
Father ever dwelleth here; we cannot be 
banished. When we have finished our 
task, when our body has worn out, tireless 
life, of which we are the children and heirs, 
gives us here and now other work to do. 

To matter, this tremendous cosmical 
game of incarnation can mean nothing. 
.We see the dead flesh break up into sim- 



186 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

pier chemical forms and the atoms finally 
spin off unaltered by their flesh-dance, 
again to be caught up by the mystic and 
unseen Master, again to be pressed into 
organic forms, — forms that like empty 
sea-shells only show where life has been. 
And so on forever. But to life some edu- 
cative purpose must be operative through 
it all. Life that made eyes must see more 
than eyes; life that made brains must 
know more than brains. There is doubt- 
less pain and strain ; but is there to be no 
ultimate justification? We may catch 
glimpses of reasons. Do we not see an 
increase both of quantity and quality of 
life in geologic times? Is life trying to 
do away with death and heredity? Are 
they but makeshifts, death but a discarding 
of too obstinate material? Birth but a re- 
tempering and reworking of the same 
material? Heredity but the temporary 
means of passing life and its experiences 
onward until death and birth shall be 
found unnecessary in a growing command 
of chemical and physical forces that shall 
banish old age out of the world? There 
is no inherent reason why a body should 



IMMORTALITY 187 

grow decrepit. If it can be made to pre- 
serve its suppleness for fifty years why 
not for a thousand? It may transpire that 
the dream of an elixir of life may come 
true through scientific progress despite the 
savage death-blow given it by Brown- 
Sequard. The more sin, selfishness, and 
wrong there is the shorter is the average 
length of human lives. If you will look 
into the rich and awful science of statistics 
you will find proof of this in every class 
of society. When we apply ourselves to 
enrich and lengthen our life-time with the 
same zeal we now use in killing each other 
1 — when the endowments of the world's 
scientific schools equal the cost of the 
world's armies then there will be a very 
different life-table found in the insurance- 
offices. 

Finally with mournful echoing recur- 
rence comes the old question: How much 
of individuality persists and passes un- 
touched through death's fingers? How 
far does the graduate life carry with it the 
results of experience? I would answer: 
All that you ought to desire, all that is best, 
all that you will want when you fully 



188 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

understand how little and poor is individu- 
ality and that there is something including 
it and far better. I have a strange inabil- 
ity, personally, to understand the, to me, 
absurd hunger after personal identity. It 
appears to me a childish obtuseness of 
character. The great and glorious free- 
ness and largeness of life, the decentral- 
ized, impersonal quality of it seems to be 
unappreciated. I do not see how people 
can fail to understand that personal iden- 
tity is not only impossible, does not exist 
now and here, but that the desire of it is 
the renunciation of progress. We grow 
and advance only by change, only by break- 
ing up identity and becoming other. 
Think also of the lack of identity or indi- 
viduality in nature. There is no person- 
ality and individualism there, and yet there 
is something that includes personality and 
is much more. There is will, conscious- 
ness, intelligence, life, — but not identity 
or individuality. So the life that is the 
heart of us invites us to leave our little 
self and find a larger self. Eeligion is our 
yes to that invitation. Materialism and 
pessimism is the saying no to it. The 



IMMORTALITY 189 

immortality that is alone possible or de- 
sirable is the losing of our life, the indi- 
vidual identity-loving life, again to find it 
as the impersonal but richer, deeper life 
of nature and God. God denies you an 
immortality of individualism and identity 
because he loves you so well that he re- 
fuses you your crude childish desire in 
order to offer you something infinitely bet- 
ter. People do not seem to see how 
narrow, small and partial is the dissociate 
speck of the individual, and that as an 
individual progresses in all the virtues of 
character he ever becomes proportionally 
less individual and less centralized, always 
more like the divine prototype of his im- 
personal father, Life. The love of indi- 
vidualism is the love of imperfection. 
This may to some seem a hard doctrine. 
It is not perhaps an easy task for the 
butterfly to break its way out through the 
manifold bonds of its cocoon, but when 
risen into the large air and sunshine does 
it regret the birth-struggle? They who 
think they are being cheated of reality for 
a metaphysic illusion will find in breaking 
through the bonds of flesh that they also 



igo THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

have brought with them splendid wings 
for rising in the no less real but rarer air 
of spiritual trust in life. It is not that we 
love less the thousand ties of flesh, home 
and kindred, but that in recognizing the 
paternity and fraternity of all life, we find 
love commensurate with that life. I do 
not think there was any cold, stony harsh- 
ness in the face of Jesus when he uttered 
those most profoundly significant of all 
words, "Who is my mother, and who are 
my brethren ? Whosoever shall do the will 
of my Father, the same is my brother, and 
sister, and mother." What a recall to the 
common life of the spirit? What unity 
with the common life based upon loving 
obedience to the will of the Father. What 
a wonderful rebuke of the love of individ- 
ualism. He did not love his mother less 
but humanity more. The more we rise 
into that impersonal atmosphere the more 
are we careless of the fate of per- 
sonal identity. The composite photograph 
shows the fundamental and enduring qual- 
ity, the average feature. In a certain 
sense life and history are taking human- 
ity's composite photograph; but, inordi- 



IMMORTALITY 191 

nately-loving individualism, each sitter 
conceitedly demands that his own picture 
be left -untouched and unblurred by that 
of the others, and that his poor little por- 
trait shall stand alone and forever — pre- 
cisely what the divine photographer does 
not wish and will not permit. Obstinacy 
persists and God smashes the negative to 
the ground with the unanswerable argu- 
ment called death. Because it is more 
than metaphor that in many ways your 
body may be likened unto a photographer's 
negative: created, for example, by the in- 
flashing of a heavenly ray of light among 
the highly unstable chemicals of matter; 
useless, except as an intermediate step to 
a clearer showing of the character; black 
and invisible unless shone through by the 
pure light of life and love ; fragile as glass, 
— and lastly the poor, weak, shadowy, dead 
counterfeit of a throbbing, marvellous, liv- 
ing reality. The hunger for an immortal- 
ity of the body, of the senses, the lust of 
immortality, is, in empty fatuousness, only 
comparable to the mania of a crazy pho- 
tographer interested only in his negatives, 
and who never " develops " one, or to the 



192 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

foolishness that values photographs more 
than the friends themselves. If we once 
get our spiritual eye fixed upon the deep 
reality and unity hidden by the Maia-veil- 
ings of individuality and flesh, the cravings 
of our weak hearts for eternal continuance 
of our little bundle of littlenesses, would 
fall away from us as softly as the wayward 
longings of childhood. We could then see 
that it is the quality of all life, the progres- 
sive purity, power, and increase of life in 
the abstract, that become all-important. 
Eeligion would become the love and ven- 
eration of Life the Father of us ; morality 
the cheerful obedience of the individual to 
that Father ; Heaven the reentrance of the 
individual life into the great unity. Much 
of the old religion was irreligious ; its God 
a far-away dead abstraction, not a living, 
ever-present-love; its immortality was at 
heart a desire for death, its spiritualism 
at heart a barbaric materialism. To this 
death of faith and irreligious religion, 
comes the sympathetic study and love of 
nature — that is, science — and reveals to us 
the opulence of life, the infinity of intel- 
lect in nature, the inexhaustibleness of her 



IMMORTALITY. 193 

resources and of her diversity, her beauty, 
and her splendor. The old materialistic 
degradation of religion forefelt its doom 
would come from this spiritualistic revivi- 
fication, and the devotees cried out against 
science as atheistic. And science found 
some foolish enemies in her own camp who, 
misreading their divine book, joined in the 
cry — ' ' Nothing but mechanics ! ' l It was a 
dismal short-lived croak. We now see that 
not only are science and her workers reli- 
gious, but without scientific knowledge 
there can be no adequate idea or practice of 
religion. You can't love God unless you 
love and know what he is doing in this 
universe. The man who in a walk goes 
neglectfully and obliviously by a million 
mysteries and wonders which God has been 
toiling to eliminate for ages, — such a man 
cannot lay much claim to God's friendship. 
If we love our friend, we have some inter- 
est in the deepest concern of his life. The 
foolishest of all fears is the fear that sci- 
ence is somehow going to destroy all good 
things of faith and life. In truth it reveals 
all good things. It demonstrates and man- 
ifests both God and immortality, — God as 



i 9 4 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

the Father of all life, immortality as the 
surety of the conservation and non-wastage 
of that life. Much of the fear of science, 
is, as I have said, the fear of the old mate- 
rialistic religion in presence of the larger 
faith that burns up its beloved errors. 
They who had been promised and had 
argued themselves into a groundless belief 
in the value and immortality of a bundle 
of sensual appetites, selfish desires, and 
imperfections saw far in advance that any 
large study of life and nature would dash 
their wretched faith to atoms. And sci- 
ence has over-ridden this unfaithful faith. 
"He that soweth to his flesh shall of the 
flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth 
to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life 
everlasting." This is as true scientifically 
as it is true morally and religiously. 

People generally cherish the delusion 
that their hunger, pretended or real, for 
immortality is a virtue and a thing to be 
proud of. Careful observation has con- 
vinced me that in many cases it is distinctly 
and nothing less than a very narrow sort 
of selfishness. It does not usually flow 
from a large love of life, or of the things 



IMMORTALITY 195 

Life is seeking to bring about in this world. 
People who believe most vindictively in 
the belief are such as have done very little 
toward enlarging their own life or that of 
their fellow-men. It is commonly sup- 
posed that there can be no greater heresy 
and injury to both religion and morality, 
than any negative attitude toward the be- 
lief, or doubt thrown upon it. But I am 
convinced that it is very commonly, if not 
usually, of distinctly pernicious influence 
upon character and society. If one be- 
lieves in the old-fashioned "soul," and in 
its " salvation/ ' and that one's own soul 
has a surety of heaven, nothing can more 
effectually breed practical fatalism, laissez- 
faire, and egregious conceit. The consum- 
mate ludicrousness of a " sanctified' ' and 
saintly crank is only better concealed in 
many who have been less clumsy in the 
self-cheating and delusional processes of 
mind whereby they have erected a very 
high wall to hide ugly truths and plain 
duties from view. The perfervidness of 
the belief, moreover, has always a plain 
smell of intoxication about it; it is almost 
always an artificial emotion, whose 



196 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

strength is largely dependent upon the 
amount of misery and poverty hidden by 
the illusion of a false gaiety and a pre- 
tended certainty. 

There was once a splendid scoundrel who 
defied government and armies with a horde 
of invincible slaves to whom danger was 
delight, and who sought death by unfal- 
tering obedience to their master. Their 
belief in after-life, and in its disposal by 
their tyrant god, was made incomprehen- 
sibly strong by the trick of drugging them 
with a narcotic, and, while insensible, con- 
veying them to a mountain paradise where 
every delight of every sense was drenched 
with satisfaction. After this foretaste of 
heaven, they were again put to sleep and 
conveyed to the world, and after this there 
was no doubt about obedience to the com- 
mands of a master who had at his dis- 
posal such a heaven as that. To get on 
the safe side, to win by excess of flattery 
or obedience the good will of a tyrant god, 
has been too common a characteristic of 
religion; and so, alas, has the seeking of 
immortality often been a sharp looking out 
for " number one" in the chances of life. 



IMMORTALITY 197 

Just as the sacrificial aspects of much re- 
ligion, scape-goat sheep and scape-goat 
Christs, have been tricks, fine or flimsy, 
to get rid of conscience and compound 
with the devil called God, so the attainment 
of heaven has frequently been a fine game 
to get the advantage of one's enemies, 
and of those not so cunning. The rabid- 
ness of the belief has usually depended 
upon the proportion of the few saved 
and the many damned, and the frightful 
immorality of any salvation whatsoever 
enjoyed, while there was any damnation 
suffered, was a thought kept well out of 
sight. 

The unconscious power and origin of the 
belief, however, have, of course, come from 
larger and deeper minds and reasons than 
such self-seekers could fathom. The aris- 
ing of the belief in historical times and 
religions, where it was heretofore non-exis- 
tent, seems to me another example of the 
breaking forth of the consciousness of 
man's divine origin in nature, this con- 
sciousness and belief having been kept in 
abeyance by the demands of the nutritional 
struggle and progress in incarnation. 



198 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

These early shapings of the doctrine are 
the crude ploughing and breaking of the 
ground for a better harvest. No great re- 
ligious truth comes so suddenly to perfec- 
tion as this, and the belief must yet cleanse 
itself of outrageous crudities, and perfect 
itself to finer issues and more truthful 
truth. After the establishment of the fact 
comes the limitations of degrees, and the 
refinement of qualities. Like all other de- 
ductive and religious truths, this belief 
must be made scientific; the rational sys- 
tematizing consciousness must take it in 
hand, and it must submit to the calm es- 
timation of proof, limit, and degree, of a 
sympathetic but unbiased judgment. 

"If a man die shall he live again !" 
The very wording of the question betrays 
the visible hope, the doubtful longing. 
One feels the wavelet poised for an instant 
in semi-independence, and the large ocean 
certain to draw it back again. The word- 
ing also betrays the crudity of the con- 
ception, and answers itself. There is 
shown an entire lack of discrimination as 
to meaning of words, and extent of facts. 
What is man? What is death? What is 



IMMORTALITY 199 

it to live again? To the unthinking the 
answers seem very easy to give, but to the 
thoughtful they arouse profound counter- 
queries. 

In the ordinary and accepted definition 
of the word, "a man" is understood to 
be any representative of the genus Homo, 
whether he be a nameless African savage, 
or one of civilization's most cultivated 
scientists. If the fact of possession of the 
human form implies the possession of an 
undying soul-life, then no line can be 
drawn at the upper limits of the animal 
or vegetable kingdoms. Everything that 
lives is so strikingly filled with the same 
mental force, that it is the veriest trifling 
to deny any animal and plant the same 
right and necessity of future living as our- 
selves. This brings into view the clear 
evidence of absurdity in the common doc- 
trine. According to that doctrine heaven, 
or the function of the future life, is 
to be one of enjoyment and general 
objectlessness. There is here a with- 
drawal of divine energy from use or work 
that is unlike anything else known or 
thinkable in all the worlds of mind or mat- 



200 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

ter. If the possession of such "soul," di- 
visible from body, is certain in man, it is, 
as I have said, certain in animal or plant, 
and if by natural or divine ordering, this 
homo-soul, at the death of the body, rushes 
away from earth and work, so, precisely, 
must animal and plant-soul spurn matter 
and life therein. Not to assent to this in- 
troduces a new principle: either animal- 
soul and homo-soul are essentially differ- 
ent, (which nobody would now be silly 
enough to affirm), or there is introduced 
a stage of progress or a degree of soul only 
thus rewarded. To make salvation or the 
heaven-getting of soul depend upon any 
such indeterminate and indeterminable 
point of progress or merit is, from that 
point of view, to land the whole question 
in an immovable cloud of vagueness. To 
drain off from earth and from functional 
activity the souls of plant, animal, and hu- 
man beings that die in one year alone, 
would require an infinite inexhaustibleness 
of the Source of Life. There is not the 
least reason to suppose that the law of the 
conservation of energy is not as rigidly 
applicable to Life as to any other form of 



IMMORTALITY 201 

force. To attempt to conceive it other- 
wise lands us at once into unthinkableness 
and nonsense. 

We therefore see that any fact of immor- 
tality must be in harmony with the fact 
of the life or soul of all living things, and 
that functionless life or soul is quite as 
abhorrent and unthinkable as functionless 
force of any kind. The beauty of such a 
conclusion is the proof that the sort of a 
soul and heaven commonly desired is as 
inethical and irreligious as it is unscien- 
tific and impossible. " Salvation " was a 
spoiled child's theft of the cake of hap- 
piness and hiding in the garret of heaven 
to eat it alone. There may be such a 
heaven of inactive enjoyment and selfish 
pleasure, but God's Buddhas do not enter 
it while the struggle of the world-process 
is still going on, and I have such a firm 
conviction of His loving justice that if 
His Buddhas beneficently postpone it of 
their own will, selfish laziness will hardly 
be able to steal past His inattention. Par- 
asitism is, after all, a very small fact in 
the world, and even that is usually made 
to confer indirect blessing. The radiation 



202 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

of the sun's light into space is not lost or 
losable, and if there is such an irradiation 
of Soul into the regions of space as the 
common idea holds, I suspect it is none 
the less functional and utilized somewhere 
and sometime. As neither can be annihi- 
lated, they must go on until " absorption' ' 
does take place. What is the influence 
upon character of persistent enjoyment or 
resting, is plainly seen in the depravity 
and mental vacuity of our social do-noth- 
ings. Life is a force, and Biologos is of 
all things a worker: it is hardly probable 
He will excuse His forces from activity, 
or His souls from work. Heaven is quite 
the last and absurdest thing to think of. 

As we daily see, there are two ways 
whereby soul-activity is kept persistent, 
and immortality really attained : by hered- 
ity, and by spiritual influence. The first is 
more physical in mechanism, and seem- 
ingly the more powerful ; but the second, I 
doubt not, is, in a large way, quite as real 
and more effectively strong. Marcus 
Aurelius sends his thoughts, the sample 
and ideal of his soul, down the centuries, 
and procreates spiritual children wherever 



IMMORTALITY 203 

his words go. But by heredity is the more 
certain and methodical manner, and no sin 
is greater than that of large minds and 
hearts refusing or ignoring the duty of 
child-raising. It is towards this that the 
world-process has struggled for a million 
years, and the thread of purpose, tire- 
lessly and patiently followed through the 
long labyrinth of development, is thus 
cruelly snapped in an hour of selfishness 
and waywardness. If there is any signifi- 
cance and object in the incarnation-process, 
it is bound up with the best type of civ- 
ilized manhood and womanhood. There- 
fore, the very acme of sin against the Holy 
Ghost is refusal to perpetuate that type. 
If the old idea of a judgment-day were a 
truth, the first question asked of the civ- 
ilized sinner would be not as to murder 
or any crime against present society alone, 
but as to the more heinous crime of dis- 
loyalty to God Himself, to His work, and 
to the future, by wilful disobedience to the 
second law of the incarnation-process. 

And if by circumstance or accident child- 
raising is refused to one, it behooves him 
to devote the same energy and self-sacri- 



204 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

fice to the fundamental aim of Biologos: 
orphans are to be raised, and the work 
helped onward as evidently purposed. 
Or, if perhaps to such be given an excep- 
tional power of thought, or other means of 
after-death influence upon the world, that 
function should be exercised as a distinct 
atonement. "It is dangerous to be be- 
lieved," only when the belief inculcated 
contradicts the evident purposes of the 
subtle wisdom moving all life. There is 
never much danger in simple kindness, and 
much of our misery and sin come from 
lack of it. 

The genuine "victory over death " and 
the grave will come only in the persistence 
of continuity of the pliant and progressive 
individual. In the meantime, the thought- 
ful kindness of God is shown in the peace 
and silent ease with which duteous souls 
slip the bonds of finished life. To those 
who have completed their clear duties, 
death's visage is no horrible one, and to 
them the final rest comes as the night's 
sleep, which is indeed a daily warning and 
reminder of it, and initiator into it. 
From His obedient animals He has hidden 



IMMORTALITY 205 

the very knowledge of death, and at life's 
proper ending His obedient human chil- 
dren have become so wearied with the long 
day's work, and the twilight of life's even- 
ing so softly and sweetly passes into the 
night of death, that the silence of the un- 
seen stars only equals the silence of the 
tired-out heart. The body has not been 
their chief love, nor things corporeal their 
sole concern, and, in losing the body, self 
has not therefore been lost. But it is they 
who have not been loyal to God and aidful 
in His work, they who have not found, ex- 
plored, and utilized their own spiritual na- 
tures, these are they that fear death and 
shudder with horror at his approach. Ee- 
liance upon the spiritual generates that 
confidence in it that robs death of his terri- 
bleness. They who have loved life for the 
body's sake, thinking corporeality the end 
and not the means, such naturally feel that 
in giving up the body, all is given up. 
"The lack of evidence of immortality," 
of which the complaint is common, seems 
to me a most wise provision on God's part. 
The lack must continue until the task to 
which we are set is completed, and the 



206 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

consciousness of one's own immortal na- 
ture is so clear that evidence of the com- 
mon sort would be positively needless, or 
even repulsive. It is well that the evi- 
dence furnished by the motley crew of 
spiritists is so valueless and inconclusive, 
else the race in possession of such a cer- 
tainty would become as spiritually de- 
graded and vapidly materialistic as these 
precious folk. God would indeed be cruel 
to provide such a heaven for us, or to make 
us so convinced of an undeserved immor- 
tality, that the lesson of corporeal life 
would be utterly misused. Mankind are 
always seeking and making for themselves 
the illusions of fatalisms and certainties 
which excuse inertia and obviate the pain 
and fact of progress. None such is more 
potent for evil than this of an unfaltering 
belief in immortality, which, even if the 
desired were obtainable, hides duty too 
deftly, and neglects that preparation of 
spirit here that alone would make a heaven 
anywhere. The doubt and the doubtful 
hope arouse the startled heart to a study of 
the conditions of immortality, and keep it 
plastic to the ideas and influence of the 



IMMORTALITY 207 

spirit of God ever drawing us subtly and 
kindly to the life of tlie spirit. 

A little reflection will show us that what 
is usually prized most as worth a life after 
death, are those things least liable and 
least truly worthy to outlive the body. It 
is individuality, peculiarity, or the specific 
difference of self that is hugged with an 
exaggerated care and fervor. But all spir- 
itual progress is progress out of individ- 
ualism and peculiarity and difference. 
Beaching and gaining true personality is 
leaving and losing true individuality. As 
we approximate perfection we become 
nearer alike, and the ideal of all perfection 
of character is that of God, all imperfec- 
tions of finiteness having been left and the 
equilibrium of all attributes attained. 
The belief in any specific difference of es- 
sential being is largely begotten and 
nourished by those differences of organi- 
zation and corporeality which are consti- 
tuted by the accidents of incarnation. It 
is almost impossible to think of them as 
not rooted solely in matter. As we travel 
inward along any or all lines of sensa- 
tion, each organ referring elsewhere for its 



208 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

raison d'etre, and as we follow out the 
reference until is reached the last secret 
chamber beyond which, there is no refer- 
ence, we find that we have long since left 
behind us most that renders us recogniz- 
able, or individually peculiar. We have 
thus attained a purity and perfection of 
our deep inner being that is nearly or quite 
identical with that of the essential being 
of everything else that lives, and like that 
of pure spirit before clothing itself with 
individuality and materiality. 

Whether a spiritualized and noble per- 
sonality can hold unified, through and be- 
yond death, the cluster of peculiarities and 
attributes which, if existing, are uncaused 
by the accidents of organization, and that 
therefore do not end with disorganization, 
this peculiar cluster that we specifically 
distinguish as our friend — this neither God 
nor reason nor experience has certainly 
told us, and for this doubtful, hopeful, 
blessed ignorance, let us thank God, and 
seek not too curiously to raise the veil. 
Perhaps our ignorance is proof of the com- 
parative unimportance of the question. 
As the highest souls value the distinct and 



IMMORTALITY 209 

separate individuality ever less, and al- 
ways seek the perfection of non-individual 
personality, so our means of the attain- 
ment of genuine immortality is in that 
power of spirit over time whereby the fu- 
ture is always present and mortal life is 
merged into the immortal before death 
comes. Such souls have long known that 
materiality or corporeality is the scaffold- 
ing about the steeple of life (the tower 
supporting the scaffold as the spirit does 
the body), and when the spire is completed, 
the workmen and death remove the hiding 
framework of both buildings to allow the 
self-sustaining column to stand forth in 
naked beauty and aspiring strength. And 
as in everything else, the beauty and 
strength, both of spire and of spirit, will 
approximate the ideal exactly in propor- 
tion as each has escaped the peculiarities 
and defects of individualization, and has 
realized the unique purity and perfection 
of the divine Architect. 

It requires but a little study of neurology 
and psychology to give demonstration to 
this truth. The products of organization 
die with disorganization. Most, if not all, 



2io THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

of what people mean by individuality and 
personal identity is a product of organiza- 
tion, is an accident of incarnation. Chil- 
dren are similar to each other; they are 
lovable partly because idiosyncrasy and 
individualism have not yet developed. As 
we grow older we cultivate individuality, 
until the very old are often angular, cranky, 
individual with a vengeance! Death, 
thank heaven, is the end of that, the cer- 
tainty of a non-eternalizing of the imper- 
fect. Birth is a new trial. Incarnation 
and reincarnation are the ever-renewed 
work of Life. Through the laws of he- 
redity, through physiology, sociology, and 
biology, science is tirelessly illustrating to 
us how all life holds together, how individ- 
ualism is valueless, and sacrificed to the 
common weal. There is no escape, sensual 
or supersensual, from the world's great 
common life. The old selfish dream of a 
heaven apart from incarnation, from doing 
and becoming was a pitiful mistake. You 
cannot clutch your cake of happiness and 
like a spoiled child run into the attic of 
heaven to eat it alone. Life will see to it 
that you do not slip off. And if you have 



IMMORTALITY 211 

been born again of the spirit you will have 
no such desire, but will beg for kindred 
work upon the old earth-home. 

In the meantime the conclusion is clear : 
to love and aid the work of our master Life 
we need not wait for death. We may not 
seek our own salvation; it is no matter 
whether you and I are saved or not. The 
reincarnation of life is our work here and 
now. It took you twenty years to fashion 
out of a microscopically-small speck of un- 
organized protoplasm your body and 
brain. Within us we are to keep that or- 
ganization from cramping and binding the 
life, — keep life as large and free and pliant 
as possible. Outside of us the incarnation 
goes on as well, and every person you in- 
fluence either for good or for ill, thus by 
the fact becomes a product of your incar- 
nating work. Every day you have a hun- 
dred opportunities to give, without lessen- 
ing your own supply, some of your own 
life, to increase the quantity and to elevate 
the quality of the general stock of the 
world's life. Help the young, they inherit 
the world and will use it well or ill accord- 
ing to your teaching and example. Stop 



212 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

cruelty to animals, they are your brothers, 
filled with the same life as your own ; fight 
the political ruin we are preparing for our- 
selves by partisanship, bribery, and class- 
legislation; discourage war and intemper- 
ance and lessen the tyranny of the strong 
and wealthy. Wage a ceaseless war to the 
death against luxury, the poison that is 
eating and rotting the hearts of all of us ; 
love trees, meadows, clear brooks, the 
mountains and silences of Nature. Love, 
not so much your own or another's in- 
dividual life, as Life itself. There is oth- 
erwise no immortality. 

The divine story tells us that after meas- 
ureless suffering and self -purification, 
Buddha had gained the right to enter Nir- 
vana. With compassion filling his heart 
he put his merited reward aside and re- 
solved to remain without to teach and to 
help until every child of earth should have 
become his disciple, and until every dis- 
ciple should have entered Nirvana before 
him. Such must be the resolve of every 
true lover of life and of every right seeker 
after immortality. 



CHAPTEE V 

BACK TO THE OLD WAYS ! * 

While God was still alive and Love was 
Life, it was not so. In those dear far-off 
days the young, entering on their work 
learned to say : 

My duty towards my neighbor is to love him 
as myself, to honor and obey the civil authority, 
to submit myself to all my governors and teach- 
ers, spiritual pastors, and masters ; to order my- 
self lowly and reverently to all my betters; to 
hurt nobody by word or deed; to be true and 
just in all my dealings; to bear no malice nor 
hatred in my heart; to keep my hands from 
picking and stealing, and my tongue from evil- 
speaking, and lying, and slandering; to keep 
my body in temperance, soberness and chastity; 
not to covet or desire other men 's goods ; but to 
learn and labor truly to get mine own living, 
and to do my duty in that state of life unto 
which it shall please God to call me. 

i Putnam's Monthly, September, 1907. 
213 



214 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

An echo from some lost Arcadia, that — 
a sigh of banished ones, as they see the 
gates of Paradise closing behind them! 
Do the young at present, do the older ones, 
indeed, see any meaning in the words, 
Duty toivards my neighbor? Does one 
even love himself nowadays? May it not 
almost be asked, has one really any self? 
Is not personality itself forgotten or an- 
nihilated in the mad intensity of the rage 
for doing and getting? Being is lost in 
doing. What youth — boy or maid — sub- 
mits to governors or teachers, desires to 
do so, or admits that for him pastors and 
masters exist? Do the young have " man- 
ners,' ' and are lowliness and reverence to 
be found in colleges, in preparatory schools 
or even in common schools ? Do not these 
boys and girls deny by word and deed that 
their betters exist? In dealings do they 
seek to be truthful and just? Is there any 
aim to keep malice and hatred out of their 
hearts? "Picking and stealing, evil-speak- 
ing, lying and slandering," — what crowd 
of loafing boys or girls, men or women, 
in any village or city of all the United 
States, does not illustrate rather than dis- 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 215 

prove? Is it the aim of many of us to keep 
our bodies in temperance, soberness and 
chastity ? It is the age of commercialism ; 
does not the business youth or the "suc- 
cessful boss" he emulates covet and desire 
other men's goods? Who labors truly to 
get his own living instead of the living of 
his neighbor? Who feels that God calls 
him to a state in life, and desires to be 
satisfied in it? 

Financially it is the stockbroker's age — 
the village and the small city are held as 
subordinates of the larger capitalistic cen- 
ters, which again are simply cunningly 
woven spider-webs for catching the unwary 
smaller gamblers. The word, "graft," 
characteristic if any is of our time, ex- 
presses the malevolence of its coiners and 
illustrators. Into a healthy stock, well- 
rooted and of pristine virtue, the farmer 
inserts a later cultivated stem, which trans- 
forms the sterling parent sap to liberal 
fruitage and more generous yielding. But 
all for the good of the farmer and culti- 
vator! Capitalistic cunning caught the 
hint, and wherever there is an honest pro- 
ducer there are innumerable grafters, in 



216 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

graded series, seeking to steal and wholly 
take away from him, rooted there in the 
soil, all his life and sap, and squander the 
fruitage of his virtue upon the iniquities 
of distant luxury and vice. Government, 
an amazing democracy (falsely named), 
strikes hands, and by means of a so-called 
protective tariff makes the producer buy 
at artificially inflated prices and sell in the 
competitive market. Thus a nation of de- 
serted farms, of exhausting natural soils, 
forests and resources, and of systemat- 
ically embruted farmers. The living, 
growing thing, the produce of the cultiva- 
ted land, as we all know and all strive to 
forget, is the condition not only of a 
healthy and virtuous people, but of social 
living itself. To cheat the farmer is poor 
policy, either nationally or personally, and 
the appeal to the physicist and chemist, in 
"the struggle for nitrogen," will \>e of no 
avail. No more than children will fam- 
ilies and farmers, wheat and corn and ani- 
mals, grow without love. God cannot be 
cheated even by a Wall-street expert. 
Farming, either of the capitalistic or the 
small-farm variety, has become like all 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 217 

other trickinesses, a game of exhausting 
the soil, which profits for only a little while 
and in the long run ruins the short-sighted 
plunderer. When the game is system- 
atized and governmentalized, it is only an- 
other ease of " after us, the deluge !" Ex 
Oriente Lux! As in so much else Japan 
shows the prodigal Occident the way. 
With a few thousand square miles of ara- 
ble land — a mere fraction of that which 
we wastefully misuse, — she supports, by 
scientific and prudent cultivation, a popu- 
lation one-half as great as our own. Back 
to the Land! must be our insistent and con- 
tinuous cry. 

Because economics (household govern- 
ment) is the foundation of all prudence, 
it is also the foundation of morality; and 
the cheating and enslaving and brutalizing 
of the farmer are the greatest and most 
needlessly stupid of all national sins. The 
road, Back to the Old Ways leads first Back 
to the Old Farm, for it is there one best 
and most thoroughly "learns and labors 
truly to get his own living." We should 
even reverse the whole proceedings of the 
1 ' protective tariff. ' ' The manufacturer 



218 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

can surely look out for himself — he needs 
no artificial stimulus. But the profits of 
the small-farmer, the tiller of the ground, 
are hardly gained and doubtfully har- 
vested; all manufactured and all foreign- 
made things should be cheapened and 
brought to his door by every help of legis- 
lation and device of mechanics. That gov- 
ernment should plot a game of "graft" 
upon the 85 per cent of its citizens for the 
benefit of 15 per cent, is an astonishing 
evidence of the infamy of the New Ways. 
To "turn the rascals out," and not put 
new rascals in, seems therefore the simplest 
and first duty of farmers and of all who 
labor truly to get their own living. 

But to do this they must first go back to 
another of the old ways, the town-meeting 
— that is, they must first demand back from 
their political bosses a representative gov- 
ernment, a true democracy, or a genuine 
republicanism — for both are the same 
thing. Democracy must become demo- 
cratic, and republicanism must re-establish 
the republic. The old Declaration of In- 
dependence must be redeclared, and its 
modern substitute abrogated ; but very ac- 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 219 

tual dependence must be utterly abolished. 
It will not be necessary to fight plutocracy 
if we gain the easy victory over graft- 
ocracy and bossocracy. 

My friend the tinsmith was yesterday 
repairing the eaves-troughs about my 
house and I invited him in to lunch with 
me. I never sat at table with a better-bred 
gentleman. He taught me more about la- • 
bor, trades-unionism, etc., than I had 
learned in all my reading. His father was 
one of half a dozen brothers, all good work- 
men at the tinsmith trade, and one after 
another he taught his ten sons the same 
expertness and morality, and these ten men 
are now at work tinsmithing in two States, 
all successful, healthy and happy. A man, 
he said, could make more money, at least 
for a time, in the city, but he has no 
mind to move from the village, and for the 
best of reasons. " There are no appren- 
tices now," he says, and dozens of his 
schoolmates who sought careers, foolishly 
supposed more aristocratic, are sorry fail- 
ures in life and character. So far as oc- 
cupation goes the advice to hitch one's 
wagon to a star is to tumble wagon, horses 



\j 



220 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

and driver into the gutter of a deserved 
failure. In grinding his lenses Spinoza 
made a poor attempt to " think God," but 
it was better than to think ungods and no- 
gods. 

The present-day lens-grinders behind 
your optician's shop also think some kind 
of a God — but what kind? They have as 
good opportunity and as much time for 
the thinking as had Spinoza. They prob- 
ably waste both in cursing the "fate" that 
ties them to their tasks. They are free, 
however, to break their fate, and their fa- 
talism. If socialistically inclined, they are 
certain to bemoan civilization's "differen- 
tiation of function, ' ' which they think com- 
pels them to kill mind and ingenuity by 
day-long, life-long, redoing of the little, 
humdrum thing. Is not that a confes- 
sion of inability or disinclination to be like 
Spinoza, and pass to a freedom of mental 
action which rests the fingers, the eyes and 
the attention, drops the lowly stint, and 
walks among the gods, and with God? 
Disgust with the calling is not the way to 
progress. We must all work, and it is a 
crude observer who has not seen that they 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 221 

who do not work, if such there are, are 
not so happy as the workers. The squan- 
derers and idlers are far more unfortunate 
than the farmers, the housekeepers or the 
"servants of machines" in our multiply- 
ing factories. Is the capitalist more for- 
tunate or more enviable than his workman? 
Surely not, unless he has mentality and 
unselfishness which outrun "capital" and 
"labor"; and such altruism is as entirely 
in the laborer's reach as in that of his 
"master." To do well and to have pride 
in the doing and the condition of well-be- 
ing and satisfaction, rather than to do 
greater things and wield larger power. 
For the least bolt of the machine of civ- 
ilization is of as distinct a value as the 
"governor," and, egotism apart, the gov- 
ernor itself is a small part of the whole 
mechanism of modern life. What non- 
sense is it to be cast down because one is 
only a cog, or to be puffed up because one 
is a throttle-valve ! The greatest financier 
is, in the end, as much a "slave and tool" 
of the vast social mechanism as the dime- 
savings-bank depositor. Envy or disdain 
<on the part of either bears equal witness 



'222 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

to his pitiful limitations. Each prefers 
his slavery to an easily acquired manumis- 
sion. It is as monotonously wearying, it 
is as hard labor, to lend, spend, or even 
to give away an income of millions, as one 
of a thousand. And the hardest and most 
pitiable toiler is he who with an income 
of a few thousands tries to ape the mil- 
lionaire. In a different sense from this, 
too, a man may be a millionaire on a thou- 
sand-dollar income. Should one wish to 
do veritable good in a charitable way, it 
is literally true that he may be as helpful 
to others by a dollar discriminately given 
as by thousands given without discrimina- 
tion. One who personalizes charity will 
accomplish more uplifting by giving him- 
self than by giving money. The poorest 
benefit is the financial one, of course. The 
greater part of bequests and endowments 
work evil in the long run, as all students 
of economics well understand. The giver 
of self, moreover, benefits himself the most, 
— for the miracle of love is the increase 
that comes by giving, the breaking up of 
one's own limitations and bonds by giving 
freedom to others. As with light, so with 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 223 

true wealth, sharing with others does not 
lessen one's own store. And the hidden 
and denied God knows that labor alone 
creates character. Character is the reac- 
tion of will against circumstance. In all 
things psychic and moral the popular evo- 
lution doctrine is false. The environment 
is not the maker of the spirit ; unless fought 
against, it is the spirit's degrader. Sci- 
ence, however, has not yet learned that man 
has a spirit. The nearest it has come to 
that knowledge is what Bagehot called 
"the cake of custom;" but even this labor 
only can make ; this labor is the guarantee 
of that settledness of social life, without 
which all is chaos. Bach to Labor I 'then, 
is the command, renouncing the fashion- 
able pleasure and leisure, if we would have 
true pleasure and leisure. Eemember, 
said a wise, good teacher, remember that 
Happiness is an angel ever at your side 
if you do not turn your eyes to look upon 
her. If you turn, she disappears ! All are 
turning now to woo her — and they are 
most miserable, for Happiness has left us ! 
The most fundamental and far-reaching 
of all the distinctions among mankind are 



224 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

those of sex, and how one solves the eter- 
nal sex question, in thought, feeling or 
practical living, will dictate or indicate his 
solution of most other questions. Because, 
whom does not Love rule, and where is He 
not Lord? He most enslaves his ascetics, 
deniers and traitors, and least the fool. 
Love is in truth the riddle of the sphinx, 
and, as Weininger found, she ruthlessly de- 
vours those who do not solve it. Too 
many have forgotten that love is as much 
subject to the law of evolution or progres- 
sive development as any other biologic 
thing. It is the most typically "henid" 
product of life. How could it be other- 
wise, when it is not only product but also 
spring and mechanism of life? God never 
ceases to teach that there is something 
better for us than individuality, and that 
personal immortality is not His chief 'aim 
with us. Woman, as most of us admit, 
is far more obedient morally, more reli- 
gious than man, is in truth the ethical 
agent of the biologic continuance of the 
race. Beyond question, Teutonic love 
needs development out of its homogeneity, 
or its "henidism." For what biologic or 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 225 

psychologic attribute is of greater com- 
plexity, and usually of less differentiation, 
than love ? Since we have left the monkey- 
type, there has been added, how many 
phases, often as yet interfused and await- 
ing unfolding. Finck has found thirteen 
more varieties of love than Weininger, and 
Finck 's fellow countrywomen could each 
have added another. "But all depend 
upon and lead to one thing V 9 Yes, and so 
does all life — to that, and to the education 
of the begotten. What else but that is 
there to it all? Go to! In the last thirty 
years we Americans have gone too far 
back, even to the Eoman " simplicity. ' 9 
But since we left Eome the idea of love, 
the practice of it, by enduring families, 
has become rapidly more complex. To the 
unum necessarium, never omitted, have 
been added permanency, monogamy, home- 
keeping virtues, pedagogy, public health, 
civic and political honor, democracy, and 
a thousand such components. Our riotous 
modern divorce practices and statistics are 
the sole proof needed that our forgetful- 
ness of the hundred associate parts of love 
and returning to Eome were a going too 



226 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

far back to the old ways. For, as in all 
things else, it is only the more recent old 
ways to which the return is urged. There 
is an end of the matter with the statement 
that that sort of love will not suffice for 
building the future which is based solely 
upon sensualism. Henceforth there is no 
advisable love unless it is as reverent as 
it is romantic, as permanent as it is pas- 
sionate. The foundation has indeed been 
built since karyokinesis began, and verily 
let us have no fool's nonsense that ignores 
clean, pure, strong, animalian sensualism. 
But just as little, from now, may its con- 
sequences be ignored or refused — the 
mother, and the child which insures all 
future motherhood. The hideous divorce 
statistics point to far more unspeakable 
things in our large cities, denied by none 
and lately much in evidence. 

Note, now, what all admit — that women 
are what men have made them; always 
less bad, however, than men, for the women 
of any Babylon are more ethical than the 
Babylonian men. Otherwise, of course, 
propagation would stop and that Babylon 
would end. Kant's great rule was that 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 227 

we must never use humanity as a means to 
our individual ends. That marriage and 
that divorce are immoral which break 
Kant's immutable law. Back to the Old 
Ways! Back to the older woman, indeed, 
for the "New Woman" is already entirely 
too old — hoary with the vices of antiquity, 
and the woman of a hundred years ago is 
timeless and will always be young and 
lovely! She found us young and she will 
always keep us so. 

And it was woman who made the Home, 
— the home we are so fast disusing and 
forgetting. There will be no abiding and 
true civilization, no enduring happiness 
except in and through homes. Flats, 
hotels, palaces and watering-place " vil- 
las/ ! rented walls, yardless and landless 
buildings, rows of thousands all alike — 
these are not homes, and they can never 
breed the virtues that rise in the simplest 
houses built for one's children, and in 
which the grandchildren will live. Urban- 
ization is the lure of Mephisto whereby the 
undiscriminating sell their souls for a 
sorry and fitting gain. What a commen- 
tary, it is that the lovely and virtue-ex- 



228' THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

pressing word, homelike, should have de- 
generated by our unvirtue into homely, the 
unlovely and unseemly! Back to the 
Home is again the command, if we wish 
our name and hope to relive in the valor 
and virtue of our children, and of their 
children. 

As to the priest and the preacher: In 
ancient times the greatest criminal, mas- 
querading as king, chose to commission 
some sycophantic parasite to flatter him 
before as many of his dupes as could be 
drilled into the cathedral. They were al- 
lowed to worship God theoretically and a 
little, on condition of worshipping the king 
practically and a good deal. The modern 
king, Pluto, has not forgot the trick, and 
an amazing spectacle it is to see million- 
aires support the religion of the carpenter- 
preacher who once delivered a famous 
Sermon on the Mount. If the Catholic 
could be catholicized, if the Protestant 
could be protestantized! If all could be 
humanized and religionized! Certainly it 
may not be except through teaching the 
old catechism, by practicing, — "Duty to- 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 229 

ward my neighbor is to love him as myself, 
etc." 

As to the lawyer: A great one lately 
died; he was not a promoter, nor "a cor- 
poration lawyer;" his aim in life was not 
to do illegal things by means of legal 
acumen and diabolism. He was never a 
politician, nor a partisan, nor a hunter 
after the modern trinity of gods, Success, 
Finance and Fame. This is what he wrote, 
reviewing his life : 

I have indeed much to be thankful for. I have 
received numberless kindnesses from judges, 
counsel and solicitors, as well as from clients. 
I have never had a serious personal difference 
with anyone, and have never been a party to a 
lawsuit. I may be said to have been fortunate, 
but I believe that the road to such success as I 
have had is open to any young man entering the 
profession who may choose to follow it, and de- 
vote himself to legitimate professional work, and 
abstain from moneylending, company promot- 
ing, financing builders, and speculative business, 
and give constant, careful and anxious thought 
and attention to the professional business from 
time to time entrusted to him. 



230 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

As to the physician: It is much the 
same story, but, as the rule is, with a dif- 
ference. A few country practitioners are 
left who practice medicine with the single 
desire to cure their patients. The bedside, 
clinical, empiric wisdom and duty have 
been deserted for the "scientific" profes- 
sional and laboratory unwisdoms and non- 
duties. In practice, more than in theory, 
of all these great diseases that afflict hu- 
manity — headache, i ' migraine, ' ' dyspep- 
sia, nervous and mental diseases, epilepsy, 
crime, insanity and a hundred kinds of 
functional and nutritional disorders — 
there is almost no curiosity as to cause, and 
there is less inability to cure. Every lec- 
ture of every Professor in all the morbidly 
large medical colleges of the land should 
begin with: Gentlemen, Bach to the Bed- 
side! and should end with: Seek to learn 
the causes of Functional Diseases! When 
you have learned these causes, and when 
you have cured your individual patient, 
then you will have heard the divine com- 
mand to commit professional suicide by 
preventing disease! 

Every physician, indeed, knows in his 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 231 

heart that we have eaten of the tree of 
knowledge more than we can digest, and 
that if the known laws of public and 
private hygiene were put into execution 
the death-rate would instantly drop 50 
per cent. Moreover, the modern serpent 
in the tree is atheistic, monistic, determin- 
istic, and therefore hopelessly loveless. 
There can be no cure, nor is there any 
prevention, of disease unless the little 
physician is the child of the Great Phys- 
ician, and learns of Him how wounds heal, 
how sleep restores, how wise "Nature" 
persists for years, for a lifetime, through 
all lives, to outwit, heal and undo the in- 
juries of disease. Aping an unenviable 
and blind science, medicine has been too 
prone to materialism, although before the 
physician's eyes, as before those of no 
other man, have been the amazing mira- 
cles of sexual and mother love, of the heal- 
ing of wounds, of the giving of the body 
to be normalized in sleep to something in- 
finitely wiser than we, and of the ceaseless 
struggle of the hidden physiologic God of 
Health against the hurts of disease. All 
these, in addition to the absolute non-ex- 



232 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

istence of spontaneous generation, would 
convince men with logical and open minds 
that materialism atheism and determinism 
are the shallow delusions of fools. 

And as to Science itself: Every scien- 
tist self-supposed or real knows and ad- 
mits that its only legitimate method is and 
must be induction, but every one is ruled 
by prepossession, theory and deduction, to 
the infinite loss of science. We are not a 
step nearer explaining the origin of life 
than we were fifty years ago. None has 
ever produced organic or living substance 
from the inorganic or non-living, and yet 
biologists deny life, and living beings say 
they came from lifeless sources. Even 
so great a man as Huxley set the fashion, 
but Huxley was too great to live in such 
a state of muddle-headedness. He re- 
pented of his silly "Bathybias," but no 
modern imitators who discover Bathybi- 
ases every day imitate Huxley in his 
repentance. They dominate facts with 
theory, and unblushingly invent new gods 
every other day, — Protoplasm, Chemism, 
Chemotaxis, Electricity, Eadium, Hered- 
ity, Law, Ions, tout ce que vous voulez. 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 233 

They are constant only in scorn of "vital- 
ism' ' and the "vitalists," they who are 
vitality, and of superstition, they who are 
most superstitions. They hate Lamarck 
because he allows the existence and play of 
spirit in the biologic process, and they 
worship Darwin and Spencer who counsel 
monism and materialism. Oh, let us go 
back to pure induction ! 

In pedagogy where are we? The com- 
petition for endowments, the rivalry for 
success, the greed for hugeness, the sale 
of honorary degrees to kings and famous 
men, the cultivation of " athletics, * ' which 
means mostly the purchase of football 
fighters and the limitlessness of rowdyism, 
the prevalence of young men old in club- 
dom and vice. It were best to return to 
the old love of scholarship and gentleman- 
liness. 

Do we entertain any hope of present- 
day literature? They who read it of 
course deserve their fate. But the future 
will forget and bury in fitting Carnegie 
mausoleums most that our scribblers now 
grind out. The apotheosis of the craze 
is the modern newspaper. Even the least 



234 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

yellow of the sell-souls do not preserve a 
copy beyond a day — so cheaply and prop- 
erly do they and the public value all the 
enormously expensive product. The old 
books of more than a generation ago, a 
score or so of them, should suffice for in- 
telligent and discriminating tastes. 

Philosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology ? 
Did they not begin and end with Kant? 
After him has metaphysics done more than 
deny metaphysic, the very existence of that 
which is beyond the physical? Do the 
aftercoming philosophers love wisdom? 
And the up-to-date psychologist says there 
is no psyche, and sets up laboratories to 
measure the reaction-time of nerve-cur- 
rents. Post-Kantian philosophy, that 
which has had vigor and vogue, is sum- 
marized in the perverse pessimism of 
Schopenhauer, the insane individualism of 
Nietzsche, the scintillating impudence of 
Weininger, all sick and sickening men, all 
brilliant, pessimistic, untrue and untrust- 
worthy ; the logic of their labor, deny it as 
they will, ends in suicide. Back to Kant ! 

The cynic may interject that the advice, 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 235 

Bach to the Old Ways has been the cry of 
every age and of the dissatisfied of all 
times. Wherefore now repeat it again 
from the very heart of a civilization avid 
with desire, feverish with activity, and 
sated with unparalleled comforts and sat- 
isfactions? And yet it was not always a 
meaningless or inappropriate crying. Our 
most popular philosopher has taught elo- 
quently and rightly that all movement is 
rhythmical, rushing advances alternating 
with back-currents, ebb following flow, 
crest and then trough of wave, eternally. 
These sallies and surges, some of them at 
least, must sometimes have been abnormal, 
even morbid. Experiments in Life they 
may be called, and we are well aware that 
many have been sorry failures. Going 
back and experimenting again may be the 
only method of going forward. Paleontol- 
ogy is a record of more failures than suc- 
cesses. Why not, then, Sociology ? 

The great modern multiform failure is 
easily explained. In the last one hundred 
years, for all modern nations, but espe- 
cially for our country, has come what may 



236 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

be called, The Great Awakening. The 
elements or causes of this awakening have 
been: 

1. Democracy. The realization of the 
power and value of the individual, or, what 
amounts to the same thing, the belief in 
the value and the power, whether justified 
or not, whether simply morbid egotism or 
proper self-appreciation. It would be 
supererogation to point out the proofs, 
most manifest and sometimes appalling, of 
this swift extension of personal claim in all 
that governmental and social life we call 
civilized. 

2. Territorial Expansion. Every nation 
having the power — and all have had or 
have claimed to have it — has acquired vast 
areas of land in every part of the globe. 

3. Wealth. Not only have the rich be- 
come richer, fortunes which kings never 
had being now too common to attract atten- 
tion, but millions now live in a state of 
luxury hitherto unknown. 

4. Material Invention and Discovery 
have placed power and opportunities hith- 
erto undreamed of at the disposal even of 
the poorest. 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 237 

5. Science and Knowledge have been 
offered to all. 

6. The Printing Press has almost forced 
the unwilling, if such there are, to supple- 
ment personal experience by that of all 
others. 

7. Relief from the Error and Wrong of 
Religion has brought over-reaction and 
landed us in Atheism and Materialism, 
theoretical or practical. 

The first fact to be held in fixed attention 
is that in all other countries except ours 
these seven factors of the Great Awaken- 
ing have not come suddenly or synchron- 
ously, so that the universal arousing has 
been more slow and conservative than with 
us. Indeed, in only one country, France, 
did one or two of these calls to action come 
explosively and overpoweringly. But in 
the United States all seven have acted at 
once, with enormous and cumulative power. 

The second fact to remember is that 
those called to exercise these amazingly 
vast freedoms, opportunities, and energies, 
had no training, experience, or expertness 
for the unwonted responsibilities. There 
could be but one result — national, social 



238 THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

and individual intoxication, and an extrem- 
ism which, if it were not humorous as well 
as tragic, if it were not drunkenness in- 
stead of insanity, if we were not at bottom 
Teutonic, would have consumed the last 
man in chaotic revolution, and ended in a 
militarism madder than that of Napoleon. 
As it is we survive, so far at least, for the 
danger is not past, but at what an awful 
expense ! We are still drunk with absurd 
individualism, with unutilizable expansion, 
with diabolic luxury, with the pandemon- 
ium of machinery, with undigested and un- 
truthful knowledge, with yellow journalism 
and magazinism, and more than all, with 
practical and blatant materialism and de- 
terminism. Such appears the full and 
fitting explanation of our unfortunate, 
preposterous predicament, our national 
tragicomedy. This is the warrant for 
Back to the Old Ways. 

Every one will return when and how he 
pleases, in his own individual fashion, be- 
cause we are all over-individualized, and 
one must travel anywhither from the place 
where the present finds him, and in accord 
with the personal character, good or bad, 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 239 

he has acquired. Among the many there 
are three chief routes, however, which 
finally lead to old-time certainties and sat- 
isfactions : that of induction, knowledge or 
true Science; that of kindness, duty or 
Ethics; and that of feeling, esthetics, or 
Art. Genuine knowledge, the knowing by 
observation and induction, can alone tell 
us what the world truly is, and what we 
ourselves are. We must ignore the de- 
ductive, the pseudo-science, and practically 
also the ultra, the overtechnical and theo- 
retic varieties, which are of no use cer- 
tainly to common folk and amateurs. We 
already have more of the undoubted true 
than we can bring into blessed practice 
for a generation or two. 

Despite themselves all have some of the 
seeds of sympathy and duty in their hearts, 
so that by means of love we may be aroused 
and led back to a purer and sweeter family 
and social life. All need love and each 
needs to give it as much as to receive it. 
Since the world began it is the savior and 
the perpetuator of the race. 

Beauty invites through the half-opened 
door of art. Whence the beautiful? It is 



2 4 o THE INFINITE PRESENCE 

wholly miraculous, most illogical and in- 
congruous in a world of matter, fate or 
law. It may not be defined except in met- 
aphor and symbol — that it is, for instance, 
God's smile of joy at the perfection and 
success of His work. Art, then, is the 
answering smile of man, music the singing 
of the soft, low laughter, poetry the chant 
of those who cannot sing, sculpture the 
memory of a passing smile fixed in form, 
and painting the glimpse put in light and 
color. Ethics thus grows clear as the way 
we may help our Biologos, and our success, 
the fact of our helping, our happiness, His 
I Thank You! 

With these as our companions on our 
return journey, there will come to all 
glimpses of the eternal wonder, thrills of 
recognition, which more and more bring 
an end of care, strain, or doubt, of scep- 
ticism and of wrong. Atonements are not 
sudden and dramatic, we know, but are 
made up day by day of a thousand little 
feelings, willings and doings: — some fair 
sweet afternoon, for instance, of sunshine 
and breeze, some deepening twilight sleep- 
ing into starlight silence; some landscape 



BACK TO THE OLD WAYS 241 

witchery, or vision of unsuspected beauty ; 
a sudden offering of gratitude, or a service 
needlessly done ; the reach of a noble truth 
finally grasped; the perception of the 
cruelty of greed, the vanity and worthless- 
ness of luxury; the forgiving of sin, and 
the forgetting of injury; the slipping of 
the bands of fate ; and the coming of divine 
freedom; the pleasure and delight of the 
growing corn; the nestling of a child's 
hand in yours; the pathos of your dog's 
glance of dumb desire for humanization ; 
the miracle of a flower, a strain of music, 
the meaning of a bird's song ; the solemnity 
of great forest trees, the silence of atten- 
tive mountain heights ; the brooding of the 
sky over his beloved earth, your sweet- 
heart's kiss, and the whole wide world's 
wonder of love; the sudden sight of God's 
eyes looking steadily into yours — the rev- 
elation of the infinite — the Infinite Pres- 
ence Himself, always there! Ah! such 
things come to them alone who seek the 
old ways, and wish to do their duty in the 
state of life unto which it shall please God 
to call them. 



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